


You think knowing the answers would make you feel better?

by solitary_summer



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Essays, Meta, Nonfiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 23:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solitary_summer/pseuds/solitary_summer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death, life, and what it means to be human in Russell T Davies's Doctor Who and Torchwood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You think knowing the answers would make you feel better?

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [livejournal](http://solitary-summer.livejournal.com/513051.html) 09/2010. Especially in hindsight rather too sprawling and aimlessly meandering, but the best I could do at the time to sort out my thoughts on this subject.

 

 

**_There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide._**  
~ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus ~  


**_For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts._**  
~Thomas Mann, _The Magic Mountain_ ~

**_'Who said you're not important?'_ **  
~ The Ninth Doctor, _1.08 Father's Day_ ~

 

 

**I. Doctor Who S1: Everything has its time and everything dies.**

The world ends in the second episode and Rose thinks they're going to save it, but like everyone else they've only come to watch, because Earth's time, in the Doctor's words, is up. _'You think it'll last forever—people and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day it's all gone. Even the sky.'_ What is still in the Earth’s distant future and for Rose in the end will only ever be an abstract thought, easy to brush aside once she's home again and the end of the Earth an unimaginable five billion years away, for the Doctor is already history. History he made happen and that in turn left him homeless and travelling alone, trying to come to terms with his actions and their consequences, and little patience or compassion for someone like Lady Cassandra, who artificially draws out her life to the point where it becomes a travesty. _The End of the World_ is the first memento mori of several that will follow, and establishes the theme that will run like a thread through the entire show: a constant awareness of the end of things in every sense, and an ongoing struggle to accept this. 

Everything dies: planets, people, societies, ideas. There is no linear progress of history or humanity in DW, empires rise and fall, humanity evolves and devolves and eventually will return to the same basic shape it started out with; ethics change: _'It is different, yes, a different morality. Get used to it or go home.'_ Even time isn’t a straight line. Humanity, as the Doctor says, might spend all its time thinking about dying and never take time to imagine it might survive, but if there comes the time for a person to die, or a planet, the logical conclusion is that eventually it'll also be humanity's time to disappear, even if no one's saying it out loud yet and it will take the story almost three seasons to get there. 

S1 especially operates, very generally speaking, on the assumption that there is a sort of natural balance between life and death that has to be accepted and shouldn't be upset or meddled with too much, and it's not just Lady Cassandra's fate that drives home this point, but even more emphatically and tragically _Father's Day_ , where Rose's impulsive decision to save her father's life creates a wound in time that almost leads to the extinction of the human race. And there can be no guarantee of safety, this much is clear from the start and is asserted again and again, in _Rose_ , _The End of the World_ , _The Unquiet Dead_ , _World War Three_ , _Dalek_ , or _The Parting of Ways_ , where until the end the Doctor promises Lynda she’ll be safe, when Jack is much more realistic about how it'll all end, and even Rose rejects the Doctor's attempt to protect her. Life is never safe, but especially travelling with the Doctor, opening oneself up to all the possibilities of life and the whole universe, death is, in the words of Clive in _Rose_ , a constant companion. _'Nothing is safe. Remember that. Nothing.'_

In S1 things are still comparatively simple. Most of the deaths that are not just minor casualties, but bigger plot-points, are essentially self-sacrifices, set in a wider context where the ultimate goal is life; they either defy death, or restore the natural order of life and death, or both: Jabe, Pete Tyler, the Controller in _Bad Wolf_ , Jack. Their motives are the same that lie behind Harriet Jones's decision to prevent World War Three even at the risk of her and Rose's lives. The exception to this rule, the one self-chosen death that doesn't defy death, but negates life, is the Dalek in _Dalek_ , telling Rose to order it to die, because rather like Lady Cassandra it clings to an irrational and unrealistic ideal of purity and can't bear the changes that are not just part of life, but _are_ life. The Dalek's sole and unchanging emotion is hate, its only and eternal purpose to kill everything that isn't a Dalek. Even while it is alive, it personifies the antithesis of everything that life is, and as a consequence the prospect of change, of having to accept the full complexity of existence, in the world outside and, worse, within itself, drives it to self-destruction: _'This is not life. This is sickness. I shall not be like you.'_

In S1 the Doctor and Rose can still contemplate the eventual end of the Earth and the end of Gallifrey and then go and have chips and argue about who's paying, which is perhaps the only sensible reaction unless one wants to end up like Lucy Saxon; the mood is still lighter here than in any of the following seasons. But with the Time War that made Nine the last of his people the theme of loss has been built into the character's arc before the story itself even started. Rose may point out that he's not alone, that there's her, but the fact remains that both in DW as well as in TW as far as the protagonists are concerned every relationship will always be about loss, whether it's a real death, a metaphorical one like Rose or Donna's, or the kind of ending Sarah Jane will talk about. This is even more brutally and unambiguously true for Jack than the Doctor, who after all is only cheating death by choice, but he too knows he'll eventually lose Rose even while he'll promise not to leave _her_ behind in _School Reunion_ , just as certainly as he'll always know River died in the Library. For both of them it will always be life in the face of death and love in the face of the inevitable end, without even the comforting fictional illusion of a happily-ever-after. 

Nine for the most part accepts the transitory nature of everything. His arc is very much tied up with the Time War; even if he regenerated once before he met Rose, it's all still very immediate, very raw. He tells Van Statten that if he survived, it wasn't by choice, which obviously is a bit of a hyperbole since S3 will establish that regeneration _is_ a choice, but it shows his massive difficulty dealing with all the death he saw and especially the death he caused, and somehow having to justify not only the necessity of killing his people along with the Daleks, but his own survival. His story again and again returns to this point; how this affected him, how it changed him, and most importantly, how to avoid becoming what he fought: in his confrontation with the Dalek in _Dalek_ , with Margaret in _Boom Town_ , or the Dalek emperor in the finale. And unlike the Dalek emperor who believes he has become a god and refuses to even acknowledge that he _can_ die, Nine in the end he is very ready to accept the fact that this person that caused so much death might be ready to die too, and judging from the instructions he gives Rose about the Tardis, he doesn’t just mean the death of his current incarnation, but a final, lasting death that may be especially welcome at a moment when he is once more confronted with the question of whether billions of lives are acceptable collateral damage in order to defeat the Daleks and realises he can't do it again, just like he could risk Rose’s death once, but not a second time in _Dalek_. _'Maybe it is time.'_

DW being the family show it is, there's Rose, the—very literally—dea ex machina who dissolves the moral dilemma along with the Daleks, but despite this convenient solution the questions still linger, still unanswered, maybe unanswerable, much like the Tardis turning the Slytheen Margaret back into an egg solved the immediate moral dilemma, but didn't erase the ethical problems and questions raised in the arguments between her and the Doctor. Does Nine with his inability to bring about so much death a second time in fact betray Jack's death and the deaths of the handful of people who fought with him to give him enough time to complete the Delta Wave? Jack says, _'I was much better off as a coward'_ , but it's clear that he doesn't mean it and that his willingness to trust the Doctor and once again sacrifice himself makes him a better person than the Jack we initially met in _The Empty Child_. Nine chooses to be a coward instead of a killer, a decision that at least implicitly would have made him a killer all over again, on a much bigger scale than activating the Delta Wave would have, had Rose not stepped in. Is it more important to save oneself, one's soul, or to save others at the risk of losing oneself? And what about the possible consequences of that? Because this is what it comes down to in the end; not the lives that would be lost either way, but the Doctor's nature, who he is and who he wants to be. It's a dilemma both the Doctor and Jack will be confronted with again towards the end of their journeys, Ten in _Journey's End_ and _The End of Time_ , and Jack in _Children of Earth_. 

 

**II. Doctor Who S2: We forget because we must.**

Nine was willing to die rather than kill again when Rose saved him, Ten's starts out saving the Earth in a sword fight and killing the Sycorax leader with the help of a satsuma ( _'No second chances. I'm that sort of a man.'_ ), and then doesn't give Harriet Jones even that much when she takes things into her own hands and gives the order to have the Sycorax ship shot down, a decision that may not be entirely unproblematic, but at the same time is also very understandable after she’d seen appeals to compassion and justice responded to with murder and had to face the decision whether she’d rather see a third of the Earth’s population die, or half of it sold into slavery, only to be told by the Doctor that she’d better get used to this kind of thing because Earth was getting itself noticed. There are two issues that Ten struggled with almost from the beginning, even if this is something that became fully apparent only after the conclusion of his arc: power and its limitations, and, as already the first few episodes establish, the acceptance of mortality and the balance between life and death that Nine had much less of a problem subjecting himself to. Perhaps the glimpse of power he got when he absorbed the Time Vortex back from Rose left traces in his memories even if he regenerated immediately afterwards, perhaps removing himself one step further from the Time War made him already more aware that he won it, even if that won't be a consciously acknowledged thought for a while yet, or maybe the circumstances of his regeneration made him determined to prevent from the start the development of another of these situations where every decision is equally impossible to live with, but at least during the second and third seasons Ten is much more uncompromising and from the start shows a greater arrogance, an unwillingness to accept limitations of any kind. Where Nine's anger was emotional, Ten is coldly rigorous: _'I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it.'_ Not knowing when to stop won't cease to be a problem even after he does find out what kind of a man he is. 

When Margaret called the Tardis _'technology of the gods'_ , Nine said, _'Don't worship me, I'd make a very bad god.'_ The Dalek emperor’s pretensions at godhead and the Daleks screaming about worship and blasphemy clearly repulsed him on an instinctive level and to him were a sign of their insanity, and Rose, when she didn’t stop at killing the Daleks, but resurrected Jack, not just bringing death, but reversing it, frightened him. Power like this, which Nine called wrong and would turn a Time Lord into a vengeful god, Ten already in _School Reunion_ is very tempted to accept, and he neither protests against the epithet _'lonely god'_ in _New Earth_ , nor in S3 when the Master says he must have been _'like God'_ ending the Time War and destroying two civilisations. _'I’ve been alone ever since'_ , doesn’t deny this; it only addresses the consequences. Nine said _'Come on. Give me a day like this. Give me this one'_ , bargaining with fate or the universe, and then, _'Everybody lives [...]! Just this once, everybody lives!'_ , acknowledging the wonder of such a near impossible outcome, especially considering that the episode is set in the middle of a war that killed more than 60 million people. He may be involved in the events, maybe contributed to their resolution, but he doesn't claim to control them, and he certainly can't stop the deaths of all the people dying all around them of other causes. Ten says, already in _New Earth_ when he's barely finished regenerating, barely even knowing who he _is_ yet, _'I'm the Doctor and I cured them'_ , and there is a lot more ego in this statement, a greater will and determination to shape the world around him. 

In the same episode he calls himself the highest authority bar none when it comes to a certain kind of moral decision and while in this case the circumstances justify his actions, the potential for danger in this presumptuous arrogance is obvious, and the fact that it was compassion and the desire to help that drove the sisterhood to their experiments should have served him as a warning even then. For Ten the connection between the temptation of power and the unwillingness to accept the reality of death is established already in _School Reunion_. It's the chance to save everyone, to prevent or reverse all the deaths he was forced to witness or caused himself, that almost makes him accept the power the Krillitane offers, and it's only Sarah Jane who can stop him, rejecting the bribe of eternal youth and resigning herself to her own mortality and its consequences, reminding him that this is the way the universe is supposed to work; that it has to move forward and that pain and loss are part of being human just much as happiness or love, quoting his own words, or at least his prior incarnation's, back at him: _'Everything has its time. Everything ends.'_ But until the end Ten's temptation will always be life, and it's perhaps through the Time War with all its death that his love for it seems to have become an almost absolute principle, a psychological, even moral necessity, to the point where it sometimes takes on a slightly manic determination, because to preserve this, after all, is what he killed for. It's not an unreflected or entirely unambiguous emotion, rather a denial of life's terrible aspects whose existence he is very much aware of. Like the Plasmavore will say in _Smith and Jones_ : _'Laughing on purpose at the darkness.'_

The definition of life Sarah Jane gave—change, endings, and all the emotions resulting from that—the Doctor himself echoes in _The Age of Steel_. Ten might struggle to accept death, but face to face with someone who tries to reject it entirely, who while human was self-important enough to attempt to preserve his brain indefinitely at any cost, although in the end even he himself was a bit reluctant to pay the price, he defines mortality as a necessary part of being human, at the very least because otherwise life would come to a standstill and essentially stop being life as it's being defined in DW. The approach here is a slightly different from S1 where death and life simply coexisted as hard facts, because the Doctor’s speech at least tentatively starts to address how profoundly the awareness of mortality shapes and defines human experience and consciousness, a theme that will become important in S3. As Ten sees it, death, even if it's through the attempt to avoid it, is something that drives life forward; a belief that is as typical for him as it's problematic, because the inherent problem is obvious. As he himself will find out in the end, especially when there is personal interest at stake it can quickly become difficult not to overstep the line between what is still _'brilliant'_ and _'so human'_ , and what is hubristic and dangerous. Ten understands Mr. Lumic too well even then, and not just him. When Rose begged Nine to help Lady Cassandra, he delivered his verdict and watched as she exploded. Ten, even though he also tells her that she's lived long enough, when she says that she doesn't want to die, replies, _'No one does'_ , already showing much more empathy with her situation. 

But the death at the end of S2 isn't a physical death; it's a metaphorical, emotional one. Whereas Nine struggled mainly with his actions in the Time War and the moral dilemmas involved, Ten's theme for the second and third season is its consequences, the loss and loneliness, and this makes S2 especially much more emotion-driven than S1. The glimpse into his mind that Reinette got suggests that the feeling of loneliness that haunts him is a fundamental character trait, something he's lived with since childhood, but the Time War and the end of the Time Lords only made it worse and in his own mind sealed his fate, confirming his solitude forever: _'Lonely then, lonelier now.'_ But even after _School Reunion_ and _The Girl in the Fireplace_ , two episodes that stress the painful fleetingness of relationships with humans for someone who has a method of cheating death, in _The Age of Steel_ Ten defines humanity through emotions almost entirely, and includes himself in this definition: His feelings are something he's proud of, and Mr. Lumic might as well kill him, if he removed them, even the painful ones like grief, rage and pain. Conversely, the Cybermen can only function with an emotional inhibitor, cutting off _'the one thing that makes them human'_ , because otherwise they cannot bear what they've been turned into and what has been taken from them. 

Love and loss, the fragility of human relationships and their importance in spite of this, these themes are constant throughout S2, sometimes more prominent, sometimes in the background: the experiment subjects in _New Earth_ , desperate to reach out because locked into their pods all their lives they've never been touched; Queen Victoria, grieving for her husband, who saves her from beyond the gave; the Doctor and Sarah Jane; the Doctor and Reinette. Rose's family in the parallel world, and Mickey deciding to stay there, attempting to fill the place left empty by his alter ego's death. The loyalties and betrayal in the family relationships in _The Idiot's Lantern_ ; _Fear Her_ , with the Isolus separated from its family yet another metaphor for the Doctor's loneliness, and _Love and Monsters_ , where the brief happiness of the LINDA people is piece by piece destroyed by the monster that doesn't _'like to be touched literally or metaphorically'_ , and cannot touch without devouring.

All this culminates in _Doomsday_ : Both the S1 and the S2 finales deal with the threat of the Daleks, but while in S1 the theme was the morality of killing and the acceptability of collateral damage, in S2 the emotional focus is entirely on the Doctor and Rose's separation. The Doctor and the Daleks don't debate killing any longer, but emotional isolation: _'Sealed inside your casing, not feeling anything, ever. From birth to death, locked inside a cold metal cage, completely alone. That explains your voice. No wonder you scream.'_ The Daleks and Cybermen, both emotionless or nearly emotionless brains in their metal armour, fight their battle almost as a backdrop for the human drama that plays out in front; Rose's parents from different universes finding each other again and the Doctor and Rose losing each other forever. In _The Parting of Ways_ Rose decided to return to the Doctor because he’d shown her a better way of living her life; now it’s so that he won’t have to save the world on his own all the time. In the end they can see each other long enough to say good-bye, but they too cannot touch any longer, and the Doctor is once again confronted with his own words and whether he meant them; if he really wants all these emotions, and whether for him, like for Sarah Jane, some things are worth getting your heart broken over.

Another motif running through S2 is the story of Torchwood, and it's more than just details of Torchwood's history and future, or the consequences of Torchwood's hubris of building their headquarters around a crack in the fabric of time in order to explore it further. With the introduction of Torchwood an element of darkness, a breath of the bleak existentialism that will be the trademark of the show's first season especially, also touches DW, most noticeable in _The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit_ and _Love and Monsters_. When one strips the somewhat reluctant metaphysics from _The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit_ , what is left is a metaphor for the precariousness of existence with the threat of physical extinction in a universe indifferent to human life on one side, a space-station on a planet orbiting around a black hole in defiance of the laws of physics while whole solar systems are being ripped apart and swallowed, a sight that can drive people insane, and the threat of the darkness lurking underneath or more precisely within us, the capacity for evil, the self-destructive _'urge to fall'_ , on the other side: _'We should be dead.' — 'And yet... here we are.'_

_'You little things, that live in the light, clinging to your feeble suns which die, in the end... Only the darkness remains.'_ Like in TW, where this kind of dark/light symbolism is more frequent, this isn't just about the literal, physical threats to existence, but also about a spiritual darkness, the hidden fears and despair the 'devil' tries to evoke, and the overwhelming uncertainty of living in an universe where the only rules are the ones we make ourselves, and as such far from absolute or safe from being challenged, just like in this situation even the Doctor is pushed to the limits of his own knowledge and convictions and beyond, confronted with something that doesn't fit _his_ rules and beliefs; the possibility of a vastness so incomprehensible that it scares even a Time Lord: _'All these things I don't believe in, are they real?'_

Since this is DW there's of course a happy ending, the Doctor speaking up on behalf of the _'brilliant humans'_ , picking his version of the truth and deliberately choosing the light over the darkness, hope over hopelessness, and believing in Rose beats this mystery he can't solve, but _Love and Monsters_ is in many ways very similar, even if it deals with the microcosm of human relationships and their fragility, rather than devils and black holes. The episode first shows the tentative development of the relationships within the group, and then how they are systematically, brutally and senselessly torn apart again after a brief moment of connection and happiness; by death, or in the case of Jackie and Elton by betrayal, and without any kind of philosophic comfort that these deaths are in the natural order of things, until Elton is willing to let himself be absorbed because he lost everyone he cared about, and life no longer holds any meaning for him, the closest DW comes to kind of suicide out of desperation in the first three seasons. Here the Doctor can prevent it, but the ending of the episode is still highly ambiguous. Is the glimpse, the knowledge of the miraculous worth the destruction? Unlike Queen Victoria, who only saw a monster and a man who had too much fun while people were dying, and who decided to preserve ‘her’ world and defend it both against the wonder and the danger that accompanies it, Elton in the end agrees that it is, but it’s a hesitant endorsement, born in pain and loss, when he says that he now knows how salvation and damnation can be the same thing. With Elton wondering how long until Rose and Jackie will also pay the price since this is what happens if you touch the Doctor, the final statement that the world isn't just a darker and madder place, but also a better one, rings just a bit hollow, because this is one of the episodes where one feels the brilliant things don't necessarily outweigh the terrible ones, just like Mr. Jefferson’s poetry didn’t quite succeed in making twenty year old Sccotie Manista's death heroic or meaningful instead of just terribly random. 

 

**III. Torchwood S1: It's just bearable. It has to be.**

Regardless, DW on the whole is still about the miracle of life, its possibilities and potential. There are plenty of monsters, there is death, the future isn’t idealised and not ideal even where the Doctor expects it to be, but there’s also an enormous joy in the infinite variability of the universe, a permanent sense of wonder personified by the Doctor, and in the end it prevails over the danger and terror. In TW things are never that simple. Suzie, even though she has to make way for the more optimistic Gwen already in the first episode, maybe best describes the underlying mood of S1: _'We're just animals, howling in the night, 'cause it's better than silence. […] Moths around a flame. Creatures clinging together in the cold.'_ It’s against this background that life has to assert itself. 

When Gwen first meets Jack and his team, they aren't actually catching aliens or making an effort to arm the human race for the future, they're busy resurrecting people, and while the glove became Suzie's obsession, it clearly wasn't her private project, meaning that Jack, who had no problem putting his foot down when Gwen investigated something she wasn't supposed to in S2, must have authorised it, and it's he who asks the recently deceased John Tucker what it was like when he died, what he saw, silent desperation in his eyes; after all this time still looking for a bit of a _'contact with the great beyond'_ that spits him back out every time, an explanation for what happened to him, what had gone wrong. Maybe not so very different from what he tells his team two episodes later: _'Controlled experiment. We replicate the original events as far as possible. Observe and analyse the results.'_ Jack may believe he's reforming Torchwood, but much like Torchwood One with their ghost shifts he's still meddling with something that (as S2 will show even more forcibly) is best left alone.

And here the dead don't stay silent, but their message is an ambiguous consolation. Nothing. No heaven or hell, no great beyond at all. Now Suzie's statement about things moving in the dark and to an extent also the ending of Eugene's story make TW's non-metaphysics a bit fuzzier, but for the most part the message is that this life is all we get, and we'd better not rely on the _'point of it all'_ being something beyond. Even Eugene's parting words are a reminder to live in the here and now and appreciate it, entirely focused on the life and world he is about to leave behind, rather than where he's going, if he's going anywhere at all. A life that is random and not chosen, into which we're thrown as much as Jack was by Rose channelling the Time Vortex; a life without absolute purpose, and no meaning except that which we ourselves see and create. A cup of tea on a cold morning, a cigarette or one’s friends, _'banana milkshakes, loft insulation and random shoes'_ , the _'near misses and absolute hits'_ , even saving the world: it’s we who have to decide whether this is enough, and in TW at least sometimes it isn’t.

Whereas in DW the focus is primarily on life, TW is a lot bleaker. Torchwood heightens the awareness of death for everyone working there, simply because it’s so omnipresent. Suzie is so obsessed with the prospect of her mortality that once given the means, she plans her return from death. Toshiko has her message recorded. Ianto, who apart from Jack will have seen the most death in his life, from _Countycide_ and _To the Last Man_ to _The Dead Line_ is very aware of the fact that Torchwood employees rarely live long, and that his relationship with Jack is a constant race against time and death. Owen despite his outward cynicism is a doctor through and through, on a mission to prevent further deaths and hating the thought that however many people he might save, whatever he does, it's never enough; in S2 very literally defeating death, even while he learns to live with it. Gwen defiantly blends out thoughts about death as much as she can—her determined 'So _not listening'_ , when the 'dead' are calling her in _Dead Souls_ maybe best characterises her attitude—and she is the complete opposite of Jack, because for her, unlike even Owen, death is never an option or temptation, not even, except for a brief moment of despair, in CoE. And there’s Jack, who experiences the passage of time and mortality only indirectly through those he loved and had to watch die in over a hundred years, who lives next to a morgue full of people he’s worked with, been friends with, in love with, slept with. Jack, whose thoughts are probably more overshadowed and dominated by death than anyone else’s because of his immortality; the death he sees all the time and the death he longs for, that at once taunts and eludes him. 

There is no moralising about the necessity of death in TW where people die too young too often and deaths are too raw, too brutal and too painful for this kind of philosophy, the big character deaths (Ianto grieving over Lisa, Jack over Estelle, Gwen over Rhys) as well as the minor ones: Jasmine's mother's grief as her whole life falls apart, and Eugene's mother's. Death doesn't have even this much meaning, this much comfort. It happens. It's random, it's cruel, it's absurd and completely indiscriminate, like the rift picks off people. But at the same time the underlying principle is the same as in DW; not accepting the reality of death leads to disaster, the mere will to live without defining the 'how' isn't enough. TW starts with Suzie's obsession with immortality that leads her not just to murder and suicide, but also made her plan her return from death at the cost of someone else’s, anyone else’s, life because _'life is all'_ and she'll do absolutely anything to stay. The alien in Carys kills people in order to _'feel alive'_ , much as Mary killed over the centuries to survive. On a less purely egoistic level there is Ianto, doing literally everything to keep Lisa alive, not realising he'd already lost her, risking to unleash something terrible on the world, even if in the end it 'only' costs two lives; Owen opening the rift because he can't stand to lose Diane and Gwen helping him in the end, because she wants Rhys back. Jack, who can prevent the catastrophic consequences here, will make the same mistake in S2.

In DW from _The Unquiet Dead_ to _The End of Time_ it's almost always the desperate will to live no matter the cost that causes the problem; in TW the balance is much more precarious and people are equally likely to stumble if they stray too far to the other side where there's the danger of failing to find any kind of positive meaning in life, resulting in suicides that are simply turning away from an existence that has become either too painful or too meaningless: John in _Out of Time_ , his life taken from him, his son older than he and not recognising him any longer, and Mark in _Combat_ , courting death because in his life there's no meaning left except the anger that drives him towards self-destruction, whom Jack doesn't even try to save. Owen, who doesn't want saving either, but whom Jack does rescue because he's his employee, someone he feels responsible for and isn't willing to let go, and of course Jack himself, who holds John’s hand while he asphyxiates and sits for hours beside the dead body, staring at nothing. Suzie killed herself to avoid the consequences of her actions much like Edwin Morgan two episodes later, but what brought her to that place was a more fundamental problem; the inability to see even the least beauty in the life she was so fiercely clinging to. Toshiko shows a much more balanced view of both the world and her work in _Greeks Bearing Gifts_ , recognising both the good and bad similarities between human and alien life, and Gwen, although has to adjust her worldview drastically especially in S1, in the end will find her life became bigger. For Suzie the ugliness eclipsed everything until she saw nothing but a planet so dirty that only the worst of alien life wound up there. Toshiko believes humanity is worth saving and her job worth doing, in _Countycide_ , and despite her experience with the amulet later in _To the Last Man_ ; Suzie may have wanted resurrection for everyone, but when she comes back from death it is only for revenge. 

Life is never as simple in TW as in DW, or its meaning as unquestioned; _Fragments_ will show that it’s not just Ianto who has, in his own words, gone through shit, but also Owen and Toshiko. Even Gwen, who at the beginning of the story doesn't bear any scars yet and for whom Torchwood at first is about the amazement of broadening horizons and widening perspectives, is confronted with death, pain, and the worst sides of humanity almost immediately. DW over the course of four seasons has many heroic, self-sacrificing deaths, and with the exception of Foon's in _Voyage of the Damned_ they are never founded on despair. In the first season of TW despite the constant danger this kind of death is entirely absent, and the most difficult achievement is not to offer up one’s life in one grand gesture, but to bear it with all its pain and ugliness and lack of meaning without falling into despair and giving up. CoE especially will show how terribly hard this can be, and that living with this and the consequences of one’s actions is perhaps also a sort of heroism, although a darker, complicated and broken kind.

Jack’s burden is the suspicion—and after S1 the near-certainty—that for him this struggle will never end, and it'll certainly be long enough before he can reclaim the decision he thought had been taken from him forever. Jack isn't tempted to cling to life, at least not his own, because life already clings to him whether he wants it or not; the danger for him is the drop into despair and nihilism. His dilemma is outlined most clearly in _Out of Time_ and _Captain Jack Harkness_ : Both episodes are about dislocation in time, and both are about a connection with men Jack in the end opens up to about his fears and loneliness more than to any of his team, even Gwen. Both are, in a way, confrontations with himself and with what has been taken from him: John, who lost his life and family to time, experiencing something that Jack already is more than familiar with and will have to live through again and again, is driven to suicide, echoing Jack's own latent death wish that became apparent if not before, then certainly in _They Keep Killing Suzie_ , where he flat-out told Gwen, when she asked him about the possibility of Suzie also living forever, _'I wouldn't wish that on her. I'd sooner kill her right now.'_ John's suicide once again brings him face to face with the death that for him isn't a choice any longer. After the low point of _Out of Time_ the original Captain Harkness brings out the side of Jack's character and personality the Doctor first inspired, and their brief meeting is framed in rather similar romantic terms, even down to the dance theme; he confronts Jack with his responsibility for his people, his duty towards humanity and the burden of being a leader that for Jack is even heavier because the risk isn’t the same for him. He stands for the heroism Jack aspired to in _The Parting of Ways_ , but is now barred to him as much as the death John chose, even if in _End of Days_ he once more makes an effort to accomplish both in an attempt at a final sacrifice. The episode also introduces the third character who is lost in time, able to see the whole of history, but not belonging anywhere, Bilis Manger, who, like Mark, can only find meaning in death and destruction and is determined to elevate his despair to a metaphysical level and inflict it on the whole world, orchestrating his own personal apocalypse. 

In DW Jack was confronted with the question of what kind of a man he was with two years of his life missing that made him perhaps not without some justification suspect himself, and what kind of man he would choose to be; in TW his problem is an even more profound one— _what_ is he, and this is a question that even after more than a hundred years he still has no answer to when Mary asks it. If humanity is defined by mortality as it is in DW, he’s not human any longer, at least not strictly speaking, and Jack has lived long enough, died often enough, and seen enough people die, to feel the distance. But at the same time he was born human and has spent more time on Earth than anywhere else, unlike the Doctor well and truly stuck on the slow path for 137 years, forced to live day after day after day through more than a century of human history, and in the end has to try to be human, at least as much as is still possible for him, however hard and painful and sometimes near-impossible that might be, because what is the alternative? 

When Gwen accuses Jack of having lost what it means to be human, he at first reacts with the detachment of an observer who isn't really part of it all, the cynical scepticism and relativism of a man who came from the 51st century, grew up there with the constant threat of a war he lost his father, brother and best friend to, used to travel through time, stranded in the late 19th century and had to live through the whole of the 20th, carrying the weight of history with him in the shape of his WWII coat, and with no illusions left about humanity and human nature; someone whose defence it has always been to withdraw into detachment and an emotional indifference that had immediately earned him the Doctor's disapproval. Gwen’s reproach is at first directed at all the whole group, not just Jack, but Jack quickly makes it a personal issue: _'So remind us'_ , and then, switching from 'we' to 'I', because it’s he who has not just seen too many changes in ethics and morals and too much darkness and human cruelty in every age, but has also done too many questionable things throughout his too long life to accept a definition of being human that is only positive, something that for Gwen at this point is still self-understood and still unquestioned: _'Tell me what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.'_

For Jack the reality of human existence is a lot more complicated and a lot darker than it is for Gwen, and this, together with the gulf his immortality inevitably creates, makes him keep a weary distance much of the time. In _Everything Changes_ Jack believes he’s already helping the world, preparing it for the future, but it's helping in a very abstract, detached sense. He dismisses Gwen’s demand that he also should care about the death of one man with the argument that their work and testing the glove are more important than helping the police to find the killer, only to recognise the advantages of Gwen's worldview and the need for someone like her in his team when he is forced to realise that Suzie, who also wanted to help humanity, but lost perspective so completely that she thought murder was an acceptable means to this end, was responsible for all the conveniently fresh dead bodies. In _Day One_ Gwen again tries to convince Jack of the importance of a single human being who shouldn’t be reduced to a problem to be solved. Her response to Jack’s challenge to tell him what it means to be human in the 21st century isn’t abstract philosophy, but doing something that isn’t even very relevant from a strictly logical, utilitarian point of view, and if Gwen believes it will help Carys to hold on to her identity this probably says more about Gwen than Carys's situation: to acknowledge Carys as a human being with school reports, swimming badges and celebrity crushes. Gwen isn't always taken very serious with this, at first not even by Jack himself, but in a setting where the very premise is the cultural relativism and fundamental change of perspective resulting from the confrontation with the existence of alien life, a world full of grey shades and without perfect solutions or definite truths, this is perhaps the closest thing to an absolute value the show has, and a necessary counterweight to Jack's tendency to think in longer time spans and greater perspectives. 

Especially at the beginning of her story Gwen is a lot like Rose in her compassion, but she also shares the Doctor’s belief that every single person is important, and this is why she is the one who is so desperate for an explanation in _Countycide_ , where not only the cannibals’ victims are reduced to meat without the least recognition of their individuality or humanity, but, on a more metaphorical level, even humanity in general: _'I'm afraid we're all just meat.'_ Jack, who has seen this happen on an immeasurably larger scale in at least two wars, already knows that whatever answer she might get would only damage the worldview he so desperately wants to preserve—for his own sake as much as for hers. He only reluctantly agrees to the conversation and tries to break it off once more before the end, and of course the answer Gwen finally gets shocks her so much on such a profound level that she needs someone with whom she can share her despair, but Jack isn’t that person. Jack has no answer or consolation for her, just as he has no answer when Toshiko comes to him with the same question a few episodes later—how to live with the knowledge of human ugliness, the loss of belief in the essential goodness of people. When five billion years in the future Novice Hame tells the Doctor that the hospital’s test subjects are _'Not real people. [...] They have no proper existence. [...] That's all they are. Flesh'_ , it drives him into a rage, but he can fix the immediate problem and prove her wrong, and because it's DW the episode ends on an lighter note; in TW Gwen has to live as best as she can with the glimpse into the darkness of human nature that she got and how this changes the way she sees the world. 

For a show that ostensibly is about a group of people catching aliens, it’s remarkable how rarely at least in S1 aliens actually make an appearance. There are the ever-present Weevils, but they in the end are little more than a symbol for the terrifying meaninglessness and incomprehensibility of the universe, teeth and screaming rage, without language, unable to understand or make themselves understood, although they’re apparently able to feel at least one emotion: pain. Other aliens make a plot-relevant appearance only twice, in _Day One_ and _Greeks Bearing Gifts_ , and in both cases they have little more function than the more common alien artefacts that as often as not are locked away or destroyed at the end of the episode because they're too dangerous. Never even weapons either, but catalysts for some realisation about humanity and human nature: the 'ghost machine' and Mary's amulet, revealing the dark secrets people hide, the glove and the temptation of immortality, or Eugene's alien eye that gave him a chance to look back on his life and re-evaluate it. As Jack says in _Out of Time_ , a spaceship full of aliens might be an easier problem to solve than the human tragedies they are confronted with.

The 21st century might be where it all changes, but in S1 especially the danger comes from humans at least as much as from aliens, which _Countrycide_ shows as much as DW's _Midnight_ will, or _Combat_ , where people like Mark torture Weevils and court death to make up for the lack of meaning in their lives that they don’t even suffer from any longer, but almost welcome, taking a perverse pleasure in the thought of eventually devolving into something like the Weevils, reduced to wordless rage and giving up humanity entirely. They don’t make an effort any longer, or try to find a meaning and purpose for themselves when society and religion fail to offer them the certainties they crave; their solution is to _‘reduce [themselves] to the basics’_ , to explore the _‘darkest recesses of the soul’_ and deliberately become less than human. Cybermen are _'us, upgraded'_ , humans with their emotions removed, a human invention. The faeries in _Small Worlds_ were children once, _'part of us'_ , fleeing from a world that is _'more full of weeping than you can understand'_. Bilis Manger, the agent of destruction and death, is also human, or at least no less so than Jack, but like Jack had been given a gift that turned out to be a curse, and is determined to destroy the world he cannot bear to live in. 

In the end Jack, who scoffs at Ianto's bible quotes, but also believes that whoever brought him back from death is keeping him for some unknown purpose, isn't as resigned to the randomness of existence as he likes to pretend; he's still searching for the meaning he lost more than a century ago, and the story that started with Jack enquiring into the nature of death ends with Jack rushing into the self-sacrifice that is not just supposed to defeat death in the shape of Abadon, but also to give his dislocated, out-of-time life meaning and direction again at long last—before he'll leave everything behind, running after the person from whom he finally expects to get the answers he's been waiting for all this time.

 

**IV. Doctor Who S3: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.**

The third DW season is arguably the darkest, and while this certainly also reflects Ten's mood after having lost Rose, not all of the problematic aspects of _The Runaway Bride_ and his S3 arc are directly linked to that. Much of the season's darkness comes from the exploration of the destructive, ugly side of human nature, a theme that with the exception of Ten's brief (and considering the context somewhat questionable) outburst in _The Christmas Invasion_ was barely present in DW before, but much more dominant in TW S1 with episodes like _Countrycide_ , which triggered Gwen's crisis, _Greeks Bearing Gifts_ , which left Toshiko wondering how she was supposed to live with her disillusionment, or _Combat_.

_Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel_ already briefly raised the question of what defines humanity, but in S3 this becomes a much more prominent theme, starting with _Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks_. The motif of _'life will out'_ that was introduced in _New Earth_ and made the Doctor so happy there now unfolds with all its complexity, ambiguity—and darkness. Starting with the Plasmavore in _Smith and Jones_ who calls herself a _'survivor at any cost'_ , life, the will to survive, isn't an unequivocally positive thing any longer, and now this isn't restricted to single instances of bad judgement like Lady Cassandra or Mr. Lumic, but is being discussed on a more general level and linked to the darkest times of recent history. Dalek Sec calls humans the _'great survivors'_ that even the Daleks might take inspiration from and at the same time recognises Dalek qualities in them. The Doctor may claim that _'ambition, hatred, aggression, and war'_ isn't _'what humanity means'_ , but considering that the episodes are set in 1930, Hitler's shadow already looming while one Dalek is willing to give up the dream of supremacy and dies for that, he would have a hard time arguing that this isn't at least part of what humanity _is_. Joining with Mr. Diagoras gives Dalek Sec emotions and in the end free will, but it's the _'little bit of freedom'_ that came from the Doctor's Time Lord DNA that makes the Dalek humans stop and ask why, not their human nature, and it is John Smith, child of his time, who teaches schoolboys to shoot, preparing them for war and sending them out to fight a supernatural enemy to protect him.

_The Lazarus Experiment_ develops this theme further. Mortality is once again the essential quality that defines _'what it means to be human'_ according to both the Doctor and Prof. Lazarus, but the latter intends to redefine it, because for him _'Avoiding death, that's being human. It's our strongest impulse, to cling to life with every fibre of being.'_ Now this is obviously not equally true for everyone, or maybe true in a higher sense where the individual will to live can transcend itself for the greater good, as plenty of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others have already shown over the course of the show, but the season finale will demonstrate to what extremes humanity can be driven by the terror of extinction. What makes Prof. Lazarus's story more complex than Lady Cassandra's and links it to the two previous episodes is that his inability to accept his death is shown as coming from his traumatic childhood war experience: _'I swore I'd never face death like that again. So defenceless. I would arm myself. Fight back. Defeat it'_ , and in this he maybe isn't so very different from the Doctor, whose issues with death are also rooted in the fact that he saw too much of it in the Time War and felt he had no choice but to cause more in order to prevent an even worse outcome. _Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks_ is overshadowed by and thematically anticipates World War II, _The Lazarus Experiment_ deals with the psychological scars the war left, and _Human Nature/The Family of Blood_ is set on the eve on World War I; the episodes themselves may not directly address the horrors of these wars, but they evoke them enough to prepare the ground for the finale, where humanity will once more turn against itself.

When Martha asks about the future and fate of mankind at the beginning of _Utopia_ , the Doctor replies, _'I suppose we have to hope life will find a way'_ , and when they discover that the human race has indeed survived at least so far, both he and Jack are delighted by this determination and resourcefulness and Jack even gleans some temporary meaning for his own life from that; but over the next two episodes this simple joy will be turned upside down completely, again showing what an ambiguous thing the will to survive can be, if survival is the only thing it is concerned with. Life does find a way, but it isn’t one the Doctor is happy with. The last of humanity facing its ultimate end at first desperately clings to the frail hope of a dream almost as old as itself of something that isn’t just the _‘perfect place’_ , but—literally—a place that doesn’t exist. When this hope is necessarily disappointed, they cannibalise themselves and regressing into children finally turn against their own ancestors for the price of survival, willing executioners in the service of an insane Time Lord who in his human disguise had been content to die in order to save them. When in TW Gwen wanted to understand why the people from the cannibal village decided to kill and eat human beings, the only answer she got was _''Cause it makes me happy'_ ; when Tom Milligan asks why the spheres kill so many humans when after all they're the same species, the answer is almost the same: _'Because it's fun.'_ Humanity may in the end succeed to save itself from itself through Martha’s bravery and the power of their hope, but there will always be something dark and destructive—even taking pleasure in the destruction—lurking inside, hidden away, but never completely gone.

The darkness in the Doctor’s arc is more complicated, but it's linked to the same themes. As a consequence of S2 his story begins with him dealing—and not dealing too well—with the separation from Rose. S2 established his loneliness as a fundamental character trait, _The Runaway Bride_ hinted at the problems that might arise from that, and S3 explores this further by taking his obsession with his perceived isolation to unhealthy levels; after all he'd already told Rose that not just fear, but also loneliness can drive people to terrible acts in _Fear Her_. He still clings to his emotions, this much is obvious from his violent reaction to the pharmacists selling artificial happiness and oblivion in _Gridlock_ , where the quest for eternal bliss almost kills an entire civilisation, and now he’s losing himself in his feeling of solitude almost entirely, as if he'd only waited for the universe to confirm a deeper inner truth. The Face of Boe's final secret does nothing to change this: in his eyes Martha doesn't make him any less alone, and it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference if Rose had been there instead of her, because when he tells the Master that he's been alone ever since the end of the Time War he doesn't acknowledge or even remember her any more than Martha or Jack. For much of the time he’s increasingly incapable of looking beyond his own suffering, and it’s especially with those who are in a roughly comparable situation that he discovers some sort of kinship: Shakespeare, who lost his son, the Face of Boe ( _'I am the last of my kind, as you are the last of yours, Doctor.'— 'That's why we have to survive. Both of us.'_ ), Dalek Sec ( _'Your entire species has been wiped out and now the cult of Skaro has been eradicated, leaving only you. Right now you're facing the only man in the universe who might show you some compassion.'_ ), and of course the Master.

Much of the S3 finale is built around the affinities and distinctions between the Doctor and the Master, the antagonism as well as the connection between them, and the in this context maybe most relevant parallel in their stories is that they both hid in human shape for a while, the Master running from the Time War and the Doctor running from himself. They both found happiness or at least contentment in their human lives, and they both confronted their mortality; Professor Yana was willing to die for the rest of humanity to be able to get to Utopia, John Smith died to allow the Doctor to defeat the Family and save the village. But in the end, once they become aware again of their true nature, they both reject humanity and mortality. The Master immediately sees his human self as a prison he's finally free from; the Doctor fights nail and teeth to remain human, but once he becomes a Time Lord again, he doesn't want to turn back either, even for the woman John Smith loved. As Joan says, in the end _he_ was the braver of the two. If it's human nature to cling to life, it certainly does seem to be in the nature of the Time Lords just as much, if not more so. 

S2 introduced the _'curse of the Time Lords'_ , being forced to watch those he loves age and die, and in _The Lazarus Experiment_ Ten expressed an overwhelming tiredness of struggling and always losing everyone that matters. The ending of _The Family of Blood_ complicates both these statements and puts the weariness of _'watching everything turn to dust'_ into perspective, because in the end for him life still is a choice, the choice Jack so desperately wants. And so is being a Time Lord. The Doctor's tragedy isn't that he can't have an ordinary life, it's the paradox that he can't have it because it isn't in his nature to want it enough to accept the consequences, which of course was already implied in _The Girl in the Fireplace_ where he considered himself _‘very, very, very, very, very, very lucky’_ not to be stuck on the slow path with Reinette after all. Running from the Family in order to give them a chance to live out their lives and die naturally, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps entirely coincidentally, he also gives himself the chance to do the same. They force him to give up again this dream that under any other circumstances would never have become more than that, force him to change back into the lonely Time Lord to whom falling in love doesn't occur, and his revenge is to make sure that they get the eternal life they were craving, only not quite the way they wanted it. 

When Ten took Donna to the beginning of the Earth in _The Runaway Bride_ she found that this put her disastrous wedding into perspective, but at the same time made every human endeavour seem tiny and pointless in comparison, and the Doctor replied _'No, but that's what you do. The human race. Make sense out of chaos. Marking it out with weddings and Christmas and calendars.'_ And then, watching the rocks floating through space: _'This whole process is beautiful, but only if it is being observed'_ , which may mean the process of the Earth beginning to form, but could just as well refer to what he’d said before: The process of human life is also more beautiful from the outside, from a philosophically detached distance, when it isn't painful and messy and not a process, but a life—falling in love, and getting one's heart broken and dealing with a million mundane problems, weddings and betrayals. In the end the Doctor is too much in love with the principle of life to be in love with a single person. _'A whole universe teeming with life. Why stand still when there's all that life out there?'_ Like Lance accurately remarked, he also understands the temptation of the the _‘big picture’_ , and not just that, in many ways he embodies it: _'The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... That's who I am.'_ It's this in many respects vastly differing viewpoint as well as his love for life in the abstract, that creates the sometimes painful distance between him and his human companions, and prevents him from becoming anything other than what he is.

What the Master shows the Doctor throughout _Last of the Time Lords_ is a dark and twisted mirror image of Ten's own relationship with the human race: _'I took Lucy to Utopia. A Time Lord and his human companion. I took her to see the stars.'_ But he could only take Lucy to one place and the only thing she saw there was death and despair. Thinking only in terms of empires and mass killings himself, content to have her as insane as himself, it never even occurred to him to remind her of the importance of the little things and she so utterly lost herself in the perspective this experience gave her that she fell into complete apathy: _'And I thought, there’s no point. No point to anything. Not ever.'_ When the Master ironically claims that after all he’s only helping the humans the Doctor loves so much, he's mocking the Doctor's frequent attempts to save humanity, and his new empire— _'Time Lord and humans combined'_ —is a perversion of the Doctor’s dream to make people better, an obviously much more benevolent and positive vision, but one that at least occasionally also results in imposing his ideas on humanity rather forcefully, as Harriet Jones can testify to. There are of course vast differences in their outlook on life, their actions, and their morality, and in the end the Master will chose to die rather than live with the Doctor whose worldview and love of life in all its variety he can’t bear, but at the same time the Doctor can’t deny his Time Lord nature with all its ambiguities, not when he himself is emphasising the connection, telling the Master, _'Don’t you see, all we’ve got is each other.'_

And being a Time Lord is... complex, as the many facets of the Doctor's personality show, and not unequivocally wonderful. The Master probably already touched a sore spot when he reacted to the Doctor’s confession that he was responsible for the end of the Time War and the destruction of Gallifrey and his pre-emptive attempts to defend himself not with blame or anger, but with the question of how it felt to cause destruction on this scale: _'You must have been like God.'_ In _The Family of Blood_ Latimer described the Doctor’s nature as he saw it, unrestrained by a physical body and untempered by a persona assumed in the interaction with humans, as _‘fire and ice and rage’_ , _‘the night and the storm in the heart of the sun’_ and his first reaction that it took him a while to overcome was fear; Donna saw the Doctor losing himself in the killing of the Racnoss and it also frightened her, even or because he also made it snow for her in the end. There is something archaic at the core of the Doctor’s personality, something elemental, and amoral like time itself; he can lose himself in the joy for life, the miracle that things exist, that they evolved in this richness of forms, whatever the form is, finding beauty even in the monsters and often having to be reminded that they also bite and someone might need saving, and he can equally lose himself in destruction, at least for a while. Most of the time he keeps this aspect of himself under control, but his attempt to run from himself in _Human Nature/The Family of Blood_ shows that this control is deliberate, and that he is very much aware of what he’s controlling. Already in _Utopia_ , not just in _The End of Time_ , the possibility of another Time Lord frightens him, finally making him see the Face of Boe’s words as the warning they always were and begging Professor Yana _not_ to open the watch. Both the Doctor and the Master saw the _‘raw power of time and space’_ as children, and this experience shaped them, even if their reaction to it was different, the Doctor running from the knowledge of power, content to see the universe, while the Master in his insanity wants to control it. In their own ways they are both laughing at the darkness, only one more manically than the other.

The mirror the Master holds up to the Doctor also serves him as a moral compass and especially when they meet face to face the Doctor tries to affirm this distinction as much as possible. When Francine wants to shoot the Master at the end of the year-long nightmare, the Doctor stops her with the argument that she’s better than the Master, but it’s not Francine, whom no one would blame even if she'd done it, who has to prove that. It’s the Doctor who throughout the episode—with his determination to save the Master no matter what it takes, with his eagerness to forgive him—is trying to convince maybe the Master, maybe also himself, that _he_ is still the better person, even if he destroyed their planet, their people, and their whole civilisation. But what he doesn’t see is how his single-minded fixation on the Master as the one and last hope to end his fundamental loneliness has started to almost completely overshadow his thoughts and in many ways compromises him, at least since he declared the Master his responsibility, agreeing to fight this battle on Earth knowing who he was fighting and who would pay the price. In _The End of Time_ Wilf will say, _'Don’t you dare put him above them'_ , but he doesn't know that it wouldn't be the first time. 

Even his readiness to forgive the Master isn't as unambiguously positive as it might seem at first glance. So far Ten had never been very forgiving; from Harriet Jones to the Racnoss, the Carrionites screaming _'for all eternity'_ in their globe and the Family of Blood condemned to everlasting life in their various prisons, mercy was something he claimed he was done with. One warning, after that it’s your own fault. He may follow his emotions rather than a fixed code of morals, which perhaps is a necessary consequence of travelling through time and space and encountering a wide variety of them, but he does have one value and priority, and that is life, especially human life, and the Master violated this as much as any of his adversaries over the last three seasons. That makes this too easy, unqualified forgiveness that had been there all the time, self-understood if unwanted, granted even before Jack got himself killed once more in the effort to destroy the paradox machine, not an abstract virtue, but something almost entirely egoistic. In _Exit Wounds_ Jack's willingness to forgive Gray the two millennia he spent buried beneath Cardiff is inextricably and very obviously tied to his own desperate need for forgiveness, and Ten’s situation is much the same. He still needs someone to forgive him his acts in the Time War, the killing of the Time Lords, and there is no one else left, and this, together with the hope that he finally might have found a way out of his loneliness with someone who, like he, isn't bound by mortality, makes him out of a very personal need forgive something that isn’t his to forgive, because this isn’t one of the instances where he has the right to speak on behalf of the Earth. 

At the end of this story of this story full of endings the Doctor is desperately begging the Master not to die and leave him the last of his people again, and in this scene the gulf between him and his human companions that had been widening over the course of the season, becomes becomes a visible physical distance: On one end of the room there’s the Doctor clutching the Master's dead body, on the other everyone else, watching, too far away to make out their expressions. Shocked? Moved? Uncomprehending? There's Jack, who'd been resurrected and deliberately left behind, waited for more than a century, was almost left behind again, _again_ deliberately, chained up for a year, killed quite a few times by the man the Doctor is now mourning, and probably spent at least some of the time regretting that he left without ever saying good-bye to people who for all he knew might be dead. Martha, who did so much and got so little recognition, who saved Ten just as often as he saved her, but couldn't save him from himself; who saved the whole world. Martha's parents and sister, humiliated, terrorised, afraid for Martha and Leo's lives. Lucy Saxon, desperate, abused, guilt-ridden. All of them had to watch the Master enslave the Earth and slaughter millions, and they all not only saw the Doctor forgive this before it even was undone, before they knew it could _be_ undone, but had to listen to him muse about changing his life and settling down with the Master, because finally he had someone to care for, completely oblivious to everyone else. It's not just in the romantic sense that he doesn't see Martha or Jack; once he discovered the Master was alive, he stopped seeing their needs or problems altogether; they simply faded to a secondary plane of existence.

When he wakes up to reality again after the Master's death, he does realise that the brief moment where he became the focus of humanity’s hope, faith and prayers, allowing him to regain his original shape and defeat the Master, is best forgotten. When Martha says, _'Time was every single one of these people knew your name. Now they’ve all forgotten you'_ , his only reply is a sincere, _'Good.'_ He was a symbol for hope, the last symbol of hope in a desperate situation, but so was the Master to the last humans _‘screaming in the dark’_. And billions of people thinking of the Doctor at the same time are maybe _thinking_ , but there is as little individuality in this collective thought as in the spheres’ shared memories. Even this momentary, positive reflection of the Master’s Time Lord-human empire would be a too dangerous temptation and isn’t meant to be remembered or repeated. 

But the cracks in his relationship with those who weren't allowed to forget are still visible at the end of the episode. It’s hardly surprising that both Jack and Martha choose to leave, or that Martha got burnt so badly that unlike Donna she'll never change her mind and still doesn't want to come back in S4. They may still love him, they may even understand him, because in the end it’s a very human emotion, Jack may forgive him as he forgave Ianto or Gwen or Owen, but they've also both been dismissed without a second thought, forgotten, and it's understandable that a lukewarm _'I really don't mind, though'_ , isn't enough for Jack when he's the second choice after the insane, psychopathic mass murderer the Doctor grieved so passionately for, and Martha didn’t have to hear the Doctor trying to convince the Master that all they had was each other to realise that there are issues at work that go much deeper than the lost Rose, and that getting out really is the best option for her. 

It's significant that part of both Martha and Jack's reason for leaving is the recognition of a responsibility that isn't just for one person to the exclusion of everyone else. For Martha it's her parents and sister who have to come to terms with their memories, for Jack, who had a year to ponder his own obsession with a hand in a jar and the _'right doctor'_ to come and tell him what to do, or how _he_ treated the people who loved him, his team and the planet. He too brings up the year that never was in his good-bye, very likely remembering that he'd wanted to kill the Master before millions died and the whole world suffered, only to be told that this sounded too much _'like Torchwood'_ ; wrong, just like Jack’s immortality is wrong in the Doctor’s eyes, so contrary to his rules and how he perceives life, the universe, and the passage of time, that he ran from him not once, but twice. 

Even before _Utopia_ , when _The Age of Steel_ defined mortality as a necessary part of human life without which it would stagnate and cease being life at all, it was clear what the Doctor, who in many ways embodies the awareness and essence of time, would find so problematic about Jack: How limited is the range of human experience, how repetitive does it become over millions and billions of years? Jack telling Owen that forever is overrated because after a time you don't notice or bother with a lot of things any longer reflects that, as well as the fear that so haunted Ianto, that Jack wouldn't even remember him in the end. But despite the Doctor’s doubts the revelation at the end of _Last of the Time Lords_ proves that it’ll be Jack who even as a fixed point in time and space over the millennia will reinvent himself to the point of creating an entire new species, always remaining part of life as much as possible. 

 

**V. Torchwood S2: That's what I come back for.**

In _End of Days_ Jack defeated Abadon, but once again it wasn't the sacrifice he thought it would be, maybe wanted it to be, even if at least for a moment his death seemed a little more final to everyone, including Jack himself. It wasn't the purpose he thought he'd been kept for and his eventual resurrection no miracle, only the latest after more than a thousand. Nothing changed, and he had to arrange himself once more with a life that was no different or more meaningful than before, but after all maybe wasn't so bad either. Forgive the team member that shot you, kiss your not-quite boyfriend. A new day. And yet only a little later, when he chased after the Tardis without so much as a backward glance or good-bye note, it became obvious just how tenuous Jack's connection to the life he'd been living all this time had been. But his hopes were once again disappointed, and the only thing he got from the Doctor was an explanation of what happened to him on Satellite 5. No solutions, no cures, no fixes, no promises or directions or new purpose, but instead he had to find out that even Time Lords can not only be irrationally prejudiced and every bit as fallible as the next person, but also full-blown psychopaths, legends about the perfection of Gallifrey notwithstanding. What he did get, however, was a year's time to think about himself, the people he left behind to fend for themselves without a second thought, and all the things he didn’t say or do, and he came away with something of an epiphany. 

When Jack turns his back on the Doctor at the end of _Last of the Time Lords_ , he is for better or worse more free than he'd been for over a century, free from the paralysis of the questions that kept haunting him, even if it's only because now he knows that most likely there aren’t any answers, but he also needs to pick up his life that to an extent he put on hold in 1892 ( _'What’ll I do in the meantime?'_ ) and start living it again instead of waiting for someone to save him, much like S1's Eugene waited for the alien to come back and collect his eye. Jack is more of a pragmatist than the Doctor, and after almost a hundred and forty years his immediate reaction is to finally accept the situation and move on, but there is still a visible discrepancy between the determined bravado of _'What's to fix? You don't mess with this level of perfection'_ , and the urgency of the question he couldn't quite stop himself from asking one more time at the end of _Last of the Time Lords_ , although he'd already got the answer in _Utopia_ : _'And what about me? Can you fix that? Will I ever be able to die?'_ Even if he's putting on a brave face, it still takes something of an effort to face the future, especially as it’s not only the events of the past year that Jack wasn’t allowed to forget, but also the memory of the starless darkness at the end of the universe, the hope and despair of the last humans, and the knowledge that he might very well find himself there again one day with still no end in sight, which makes his resolve to lose himself in the here and now as much as possible all the more understandable.

Jack's arc started in DW with him doubting what kind of a man he was and the challenge of defining himself regardless; _Kiss Kiss Bang Bang_ confronts him with his past and the man he easily could have become, and Jack needs to decide once again who he is going to be when he's offered another chance at an escape from the planet by someone who might be rather lacking in morals, but at least genuinely wants him; and this time he has to make the decision on his own, without being forcibly shoved in the right direction. But confronted with Captain Hart's mixture of hedonism and utter nihilism even Jack can suddenly find words for what makes life worth living to him, although he himself must have thought countless times what Captain Hart says about the cost of coming back, the pain of it, the dreariness of this world, when even at the beginning of the episode Jack described it to Gwen in almost the same words as being _'dragged back into life, like being hauled over broken glass'_. He may not be able to choose not to come back, but he can choose what he comes back for, how to see this life, and what to do with it; to finally create his own meaning. 

And Jack, who a long time ago had been hunting after two lost years of his life, trying to regain the knowledge about himself that had been taken from him, who in S1 cultivated an aura of mystery, now wants to draw a clear line and start with a clean slate, much like Nine at the beginning of his story: _'Here and now, that's what's important. The work we do, the person I am now, that's what I'm proud of.'_ He resisted the temptation of the past, but he clearly doesn't want to live with it locked up in his basement, so Captain Hart has to go, even if that means having to help him first. The painful childhood memories—deliberately repressed and forgotten: in _Adam_ Jack is the only one who has to sacrifice real memories to become again who he was, the much harder, closed-off man with all those layers of defences firmly in place again. That he thinks it might be an even remotely reasonable or acceptable idea to offer Gwen and Rhys retcon at the end of their wedding maybe illustrates best Jack's unhappy relationship with his own past that consists of too many memories and a handful of photographs removed from his old Torchwood files. He occasionally and rather reluctantly gives up a few details, but the whole dreary truth about the century spent in Torchwood or how and why he came to work for them remains his dark secret, hidden away like the victims of the rift. 

Certainly there's something positive about this determination to look into the future. In _To the Last Man_ Jack acknowledges that going back wouldn't fix anything, certainly not his loneliness, which is a marked (and probably deliberate) contrast to the Doctor, who wanted so desperately to resurrect his past out of the ashes of Gallifrey with the Master, and it's a step forward from S1, where the feeling of being lost and out of his time was a constant burden and created such a distance between Jack and his team. Other than the Doctor ( _'I've been alone ever since.'_ ) Jack can and does acknowledge that the people he met in all this time, including the Doctor, but not only him, meant and mean something to him and do make this life better. But regardless of what Jack might wish, in the end the mind can't be reset any more than the body, and as he'll find out, the past, even if it is forgotten—especially when it's forgotten—is never buried completely, always threatening to re-emerge with painful, even deadly, consequences, like the Night Travellers stepping out of the old films. All the same, there will be no resolution for Jack when his past finally catches up with him; it doesn't hold any answers either, or even the closure he might have been hoping for. He can choose to believe it was all his fault, that he’s doing penance for it, and like Nikki he probably would have preferred the uncertainty that at least still held the hope of forgiveness to the knowledge that there was nothing left of the brother he’d lost so long ago except pain and hatred for him, but in the end once again the only thing he can do is live with this, as with everything else.

As a result of this turning point in Jack's arc, S2 sheds much of the bleak existentialism that sometimes almost overburdened S1. There is still plenty of death and it still is random and without meaning or reason, like the death of Owen's fiancée ( _'Why her?' — 'There's no reason'_ ), but at least some of the deaths now more resemble the heroic self-sacrifices of DW, although they still are more ambiguous. Beth chooses to die, and unlike Lisa in S1, who was too far gone and could only recreate a twisted imitation of love from the memories she had left, Beth dies for an idea, a positive ideal, much like Adelaide in _Waters of Mars_. She comes to the conclusion that she isn't human enough to live, but through her death reminds those who kill her to uphold this ideal, especially Jack, whom Gwen deliberately challenges with her question about whether it's the body or the mind that makes us human. The burden is now on him, who like Beth not so very long ago also asked to be fixed, and also got a negative reply and had to accept what he was, to prove that _he_ is human enough. Agreeing to return to the past Tommy sacrifices himself for the future, but it means resigning himself to an ugly, dirty death he feared, even if he doesn't know yet just cruel and pointless it will be, and he too creates an obligation. As Toshiko says, _'Let's hope we're worth it.'_ Gwen almost dies to save Cardiff in _Kiss Kiss Bang Bang_ , Owen and Toshiko die in _Exit Wounds_ , and Toshiko’s recorded message or Ianto’s remark in _To the Last Man_ show that they all knew they were risking their lives every day and still kept fighting. 

At the centre of S2 there's the story of Owen's death and resurrection. When it came to accepting the reality of death and loss, in S1 Jack was... can one call it the voice of reason, when life meant so little to him? The voice of despair, maybe. It's no wonder that he couldn't persuade John to give life another chance; _'I have no choice'_ , isn't going to convince someone who does. In S2, with his new-found meaning in life and greater emotional involvement in it Jack at the first occasion presenting itself falls into the same trap almost everyone else already stumbled into in S1, and now that he's found something worth living for is immediately tempted by the possibilities of the glove he'd rejected then, determined to ignore all the warnings and force the miracle he's hoping for.

Had Ianto died in _Reset_ as originally planned, Jack resurrecting him would have mirrored Ianto's own actions in _Cyberwoman_ , but there is also a certain kind of symmetry in Jack bringing Owen back to life. Not counting Suzie, Jack and Owen were the ones most ready to throw their lives away in S1 and it makes sense for them to be tied together in this story where Owen has to confront again and again what he'd been willing to give up in that cage with the Weevil, and Jack through Owen's anger at the unfairness of life and death is maybe reminded to occasionally touch the bricks and notice the flecks on the concrete and value what he does have a little more. And in a way what happened to Owen, what Jack _did_ to Owen, forcing him back into an existence that isn't the life he used to have, mirrors Jack's own experience, and is perhaps the closest we'll ever come to seeing just how unsettling it had been for Jack himself to discover and accept his own immortality. Owen breaks his fingers and tries to drown himself; Jack got himself killed fourteen times in six months before Torchwood picked him up. The security guard in Mr. Parker's house asks Owen the same question Mary asked Jack: _'What are you?'_ , and Owen's reply ( _'I'm wrong.'_ ) echoes the Doctor, who called Jack just that. Owen's resurrection and his potential immortality create a kinship between him and Jack, but at the same time they are very much polar opposites, or as Owen puts it: _'You get to live forever. I get to die forever.'_ Jack's visible uneasiness with the situation is probably part guilt, part lingering unhappiness with his own state of being that Owen forced him to think about again, but maybe also something like the Doctor's _'It’s not easy even just… just looking at you.'_ But Jack at least is trying to help Owen, who is as ready to throw his new—wrong—life away in one last sacrifice when he can't save Mr. Parker as Jack had been in _End of Days_ , only to discover, like Jack, that there is hope after all. As Jack says to Toshiko at the end of _Dead Man Walking_ , of course it's impossible to really beat or escape death, but Owen, who in S1 hadn't wanted Jack to save him, did beat it on a personal level. 

Other than S1's _Out of Time_ , the ending of S2's suicide story is more hopeful. Even after everything Owen didn't come to the roof to jump, but to help. The darkness still threatens to overwhelm, suicide is still the choice that for the Doctor is never acceptable, but at least by the end of the episode Maggie hasn't chosen it yet, and just for once the alien artefact is something that inspires hope instead of despair; the _'tiny glimmer of light'_ in all the darkness. There is a lot of darkness, literal as well as symbolic, in S2: The darkness of death in Owen's resurrection arc finding its way through him; Mr. Parker lying alone in the dark, scared like Owen; Maggie on the roof at night, struggling with the darkness within; Adam coming out of the darkness with a hunger for the brightness of life; the Night Travellers, thriving in the dark and killed by sunlight; Jonah driven insane by looking into the hart of a dark star; the darkness of Jack's grave. On a more metaphorical level there’s the possibility of darkness hidden under the facade of normalcy and familiarity: Beth's secret nature, Ianto (like Owen a few episodes later) afraid of being a monster, or the rift in the middle of Cardiff picking off people. Finally there's the darkness of Torchwood itself that Jack inherited complete with the dead bodies of the last team he'd worked with and a century's worth of a highly ambiguous history: _'Who are you people? Don't you have any windows?'_ But in S2 most of the time there is also enough light to balance the threat of despair and death, and despite the tragedy of _Exit Wounds_ the season ends on a not entirely hopeless note with Toshiko's message that echoes Jack's own _'And I wouldn't change that for the world'_ , in _To the Last Man_ , Rose’s words in _Dalek_ and Sarah Jane's in _School Reunion_ , or even what Nine said in his good-bye message to Rose: _'And that's okay. Hope it's a good death.'_

This more positive note is also reflected in the changed atmosphere within Torchwood. S1 didn't just deal with the isolation of Torchwood from the rest of the world, but also with the isolation within the team that drove Suzie to Pilgrim just to find someone she could talk to, only to retcon them afterwards. Toshiko told Mary that she couldn't share her thoughts about her work with anyone there because they saw things so differently. Gwen tried to break through the secretiveness that infected even her relationship by sleeping with Owen and reached her lowest point sitting alone in the Hub, crying over a box of pizza after she'd confessed this and retconned Rhys. Ianto accused Jack of not caring enough, not asking about his life, and the feeling of loneliness was genuine, even though given his situation it’s unlikely Ianto encouraged this kind of enquiry. Owen, who in _Countrycide_ told Gwen that he was glad not having to deal with patients any longer, was the only one who welcomed this isolation because deeper connections frightened him, but even he eventually fell in love, and Jack, who most of the time also chose to keep a distance, suddenly started talking to outsiders like John and the original Captain Harkness, and one wonders if Gwen was the only one _he_ retconned, or if he usually just relied on people not believing him. 

TW’s relationships may be a bit random and sketchily written, but love is an important force regardless, even if it comes in less than perfect forms. In S1 almost everyone betrayed Torchwood for love and a person outside Torchwood: Ianto for Lisa, Toshiko for Mary, Owen for Diane, Gwen for Rhys, and they were all forgiven by Jack, unlike Suzie, who only ever loved her job, even if she hated it at the same time, whose betrayal was entirely egoistic, and whom Jack killed without hesitation to save Gwen. In S1 Gwen accused Jack of having forgotten what it means to be human, but in _Cyberwoman_ Ianto asked an at least equally important question that Gwen repeated at the end of the episode, _'Haven't you ever loved anyone?',_ and _Small Worlds_ answered that, even if Jack himself didn't, but not without showing what a complicated and painful thing love has become for him with his immortality, a theme that CoE will explore further.

In S2 there is less isolation and more genuine mutual support and friendship. In _Adam_ , where Jack is at his most emotional, there is an 'us' ( _'Look what you've done to us.'_ ) even for him, although the new-found team spirit is probably more due to his absence and Gwen’s leadership than anything he’d done, since much like in _End of Days_ , in _Adrift_ Jack still isn’t above trying to exploit a potential for rivalry when it suits his needs, only to discover that both Ianto and Gwen are completely immune to his attempts at manipulation. Jack’s compulsive secrecy that stopped be glamorous already in S1 is also an ongoing problem especially for Gwen, but it doesn’t tear the group apart any longer. Relationships are more stable and more important. There's Jack and Ianto's slowly developing and still somewhat tentative relationship, Toshiko and Owen are becoming at least a bit closer, even if their arc ends in the realisation that they'd missed each other, never even getting as far as Jack and Ianto, Owen regretting both the lost opportunities and the hurt he caused her. Gwen may still have feelings for Jack, but she is willing to give up Torchwood for Rhys, because even she, the most optimistic and positive of the group, feels that this universe that suddenly became so much bigger and so much more incomprehensible can be a cold and lonely place, forcing Jack, who isn’t willing to give _her_ up, to bend his own rules. Even Captain Hart redeems himself at least to an extent because in his own way he is capable of love and loves Jack as much as he’s probably able to love anyone. It's Gray whom Jack in the end cryo-freezes because he isn't capable of killing him, forgiven partly out of Jack's own need for forgiveness, but so utterly destroyed by what had been done to him that he is beyond help or redemption, with no emotions left but hatred and the desire for revenge and destruction. Having seen nothing but death for most of his life it has become his final obsession, and in this he isn't entirely unlike Jack in S1: Standing over the dying Toshiko, telling her that he views death as a release, asking her what dying is like, what she's feeling, he intentionally or unintentionally recalls Jack in _Everything Changes_.

Love is so important for Jack because it’s so intricately linked to his better nature. The Doctor inspired him to be a better man, and Jack fell in love with him, and it was the same with Gwen after she'd been willing to sacrifice herself for Carys, or the original Captain Harkness; even Ianto. His case might be a bit more complicated, but in _Cyberwoman_ , even if it also was horribly bad judgement, Ianto stood up to Jack in the name of love and compassion more radically and uncompromisingly than Gwen ever did, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that Jack, who made staying or leaving Ianto’s decision, chose him at least as much because of that, as in spite of it. But Ianto isn’t only this uncompromising when it comes to emotions, he’s just as single-minded about what he sees as his duty. It was Ianto who tried to stop Owen from opening the rift even if it meant losing Jack, and in _End of Days_ wanted to open it, not to get Lisa back, but to prevent further deaths, even if that meant standing up to Jack, even if it killed them all. It’s he who tells Captain Hart, _'There’s always a choice'_ , in _Exit Wounds_ , fully aware of what that implies and what the price might have been, because he’d already been willing to go there himself. And he’ll hold Jack to the same standards in CoE.

This is an aspect of Jack's relationships that shouldn’t be underestimated in light of who Jack was and is, warchild, time agent, conman from a time where murder rehab is something you can joke about, someone who became immortal and now operates separate from the government and outside the police, with no one to judge his actions but himself, a man who has seen morals change and abused, reason twisted and perverted, on this world and probably a lot of others. Ethics might not quite fall under _'you people and your quaint little categories'_ , but they’re probably not _that_ far removed either, and certainly not untouched by Jack's general attitude of cultural relativism. Jack never really shows an abstract code of morals and on the whole seems to mostly follow his instinct and emotions, which explains his occasional overreactions and erratic decisions, but at least after his encounter with the Doctor he also seems to have developed an instinct to pick people who can inspire him or push him in the right direction. Gwen and Ianto are the most obvious choices, but Toshiko and Owen's stories show that they too weren't only chosen for their skills, but for their loyalty to people they loved. Torchwood itself isn’t the healthiest place to be in, and even Gwen gets quickly drawn into the mindset and in S2 occasionally needs people from the outside like Rhys or PC Andy to readjust her perspective, but for Jack the problem is an even more profound one, because when he lost his mortality he also to a degree lost the connection to the human condition. For him love is maybe the most important tie to the fabric of humanity he has left, the one emotion that still makes him feel human and alive and balances the predominance of death in his life. 

In _Last of the Time Lords_ Jack saw what self-inflicted and self-perpetuated loneliness did to the Doctor, who after S4 will loosen his ties with humanity even further and drift to still darker places, and this is probably part of the reason why he decided to turn his non-quite relationship with Ianto into something at least a bit less informal, even if they’ll still be stuck at a somewhat awkward stage of avoiding to talk about the real issues in CoE, since Jack’s problems don’t go away just because he decides to ignore them, but comparing Jack in _Kiss Kiss Bang Bang_ or in CoE with the Doctor’s much harder attitude even towards Rose in _School Reunion_ where he simply replies, _'As opposed to what?'_ when she is naturally hurt to discover that she’s just the latest in a long line, shows just how difficult this is for Jack, how much he still is at the beginning of his story where everything is still so much rawer and more painful every time, despite what Ianto, who is maybe a little too obsessed with the thought of being just one person among too many, may think. Jack still wanted his mortality back at the end of _Last of the Time Lords_ , whereas as a Time Lord the Doctor doesn’t want to be anything else.

 

**VI. Doctor Who S4: We always have a choice.**

S3 ended with the Master choosing death to spite the Doctor and his love for life; _Voyage of the Damned_ once again throws Ten in the middle of a catastrophe, and it shows that his tolerance for seeing people die around him is wearing thin. Even though he should know better, he still promises to save everyone, only to be again forced to acknowledge that the circumstances are stronger than he. First there's Foon, whose suicide is mainly sheer despair after her husband's death even if she does take one of the Host with her, and then Astrid, just when he thought he'd found someone who’s in love with the idea of travelling maybe even more than he is. Foon's death already pushes his limits ( _'No more.'_ ) and his failure to resurrect Astrid from the teleport bracelet leaves him kicking furniture and yelling that he can do anything, only to discover that he can't, or at least not as long as he feels himself bound by the laws he'll finally chose to sweep aside in _Waters of Mars_. It’s Mr. Copper who has to convince him to let her go and accept his limitations ( _'But if you could choose, if you could decide, who lives and who dies, that would make you a monster.'_ ), and who of course could have put it differently, like Margaret in _Boom Town_ : _'Playing with so many people's lives you might as well be a god.'_ It’s the first time in Ten’s arc that the god theme that is also evoked in the parody of ascension iconography with the Host transporting the Doctor to the bridge, comes not just with an ambiguous, but an explicitly negative connotation. Sarah Jane’s reminder was gentler; this is already a rather distinct warning. Whether it's because of Mr. Coppers words or Donna's influence, in S4 the Doctor-as-(a)-god motif is much less prominent that it was in S3 and will only re-emerge in very similar circumstances with the Time Lord Victorious. Even if Ten and Donna do end up as the new household gods of the Caecilii, in Pompeii the circumstances almost entirely eliminated freedom from a choice that in the end came down to picking the lesser of two evils, which isn’t a god-like decision at all, but a very human one. 

The concept of fixed events works most effectively on this symbolic level where they essentially serve to restrict the Doctor's power, showing him subject to something bigger than himself, a higher order of laws: _'Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. It's the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. And I'm the only one left.'_ When Rose described the new awareness the Time Vortex had given her in _The Parting of Ways_ , this didn't yet include the events that must not be, and the most difficult thing about it seemed to be the endless variations, implications and possibilities of innumerable events that are always in flux, not the moral dilemma of events that have to be borne and accepted even by a Time Lord, even if they are terrible tragedies. _The Fires of Pompeii_ shows the Doctor bound by two forces: the laws of time he'll reject in _Waters of Mars_ and with them the logic of consequences that makes this choice, no matter how terrible, the necessary one, and Donna who demands that he at least temper it with human compassion. 

S3 confronted the Doctor with the darker side of his nature, the power a Time Lord has and the danger for abuse inherent in that; S4 stresses the burden and responsibility this power entails. Whereas the Master insisted on his right to change history in _Last of the Time Lords_ , the Doctor fulfills history in _The Fires of Pompeii_ , but the episode shows how precarious and painful this balance of power, knowledge, duty and compassion can be, how difficult it is to uphold, and how important the human element is in maintaining it, someone forcing him to not just see the big picture, but at the same time to acknowledge the people it is made up of. In _The Sontaran Stratagem_ it’s obvious Ten understands only too well where Luke Rattigan is coming from ( _'Not easy, isn't it? Being clever?'_ ), his sense of isolation, feeling superior to everyone because of his intellect, stuck on a planet too small for his vision, alone in the end, because there is no one he recognises as an equal. Because he is a nine hundred year old Time Lord and not an eighteen year old boy, and because even so he’d come much too close to making the same mistake only recently, Ten rejects this kind of arrogance, but when he tells Luke, _'It's been a long time since anyone's said no to you, isn't it?'_ , this comes from the insight that he himself also at least occasionally needs someone to do that for _him_. It's not just Luke Rattigan who redeems himself and his egoistic joy in war and the destruction of Earth at the end of the episode, in some ways it's also the Doctor, who in S4 leaves behind the cold anger of the ‘one warning’ policy. When he says he has to give the Sontarans a choice in _The Poison Sky_ it is at the cost of his own life and the scene has a quite different emotional quality; his hesitation even when they reject his offer is nothing like the quiet, relentless anger with which he punished the Family. 

At the end of S1 Nine had to decide whether he was going to be—wanted to be—a coward or a killer, and the S4 finale will confront Ten with a similar situation, but this time the answer is a much more ambiguous one. Decisions are the most prominent leitmotif throughout S4. Of course everyone makes them all the time whether they're aware of it or not, and in _Gridlock_ the Doctor recognised that when Novice Hame said that she had no choice but to stay with the Face of Boe, telling her that she did, but the theme was never as dominant as it is in S4, culminating in Donna’s decision in _Turn Left_. In _The Doctor's Daughter_ , when Jenny says that they have no choice but to kill in order to save themselves, Ten replies, _'We always have a choice'_ , but this freedom implies choices that can go either way: in _Midnight_ he tells the people on the shuttle, _''Cause this is where you decide. You decide who you are. Could you actually murder her?'_ and the answer he gets isn't the one he expected. And this isn’t the only time his ideals fail and his hopes are disappointed. Sometimes biology wins, as with the Vespiform that is overwhelmed by the discovery of its true nature and in the end drowns following the Firestone. The cloned Sontaran warriors are not able or willing to overcome their biological and cultural conditioning even when their lives are at stake. On the other hand Jenny with the Doctor's help discovers her ability to choose despite her mental programming, but this choice also come with a price, and it kills her, like the Hath that sacrificed him/her/itself for Martha; even or especially the right choices don’t guarantee safety. Finally in _Journey's End_ there's Dalek Caan who, although at the price of his sanity, saw the truth of the Daleks' deadly nature and that the possibility to change and evolve had been denied to them by their creator, and decided their death, overcoming even the Dalek imperative to survive. 

The Doctor himself already in _The Fires of Pompeii_ has to make the _'most terrible choice'_ of killing 20000 people to assure the survival of the human race, and this brings a new level of awareness to the subject also within his arc. Of course for him ending the Time War had been the quintessential lose-lose situation where the alternative was so horrible that he felt he didn't have a choice at all, but this is the first time he's being confronted with such a dilemma within an episode and has to make a decision, follow through on it and face the consequences. Pompeii, like he will tell Adelaide in _Waters of Mars_ , is the kind of situation where _everything_ he does, even if he does nothing, causes death, any choice is terrible, and here no one can take the decision out of his hands; Donna can only act with him, and then force him to at least symbolically make amends. In S1 and S2, ever since Clive called death the Doctor's _'one constant companion'_ in _Rose_ , it was always easy to argue that it's not the storm in the Doctor's wake, but the Doctor in the storm's, even if he does tend to enjoy the storm a bit too much. After all he'd already saved Rose's life at the beginning of the episode and it was hardly his fault that the Nestene Consciousness had picked Earth as a new home. In _World War Three_ Nine said to Jackie, _'Because this is my life [...], it's not fun, it's not smart, it's just standing up and making a decision because nobody else will',_ but in the end it wasn't he who made the decision, it was Rose and Harriet Jones; Mickey who launched the missile, and Jackie who didn't stop him, even if it meant risking her daughter's life, and in _The Parting of Ways_ Rose once again took the decision out of his hands, or at least saved him from the consequences of his own choice.

In S3 this changed. When Joan Renfern asked Ten whether anyone would have died _'if the Doctor had never visited us, never chosen this place on a whim'_ , running from himself and his own actions and decisions, it's impossible to deny this accusation, and he doesn't even try. And at least in some ways the same could be said for the events of the S3 finale: it was the downfall of Harriet Jones that made the Master's rise possible or at least facilitated it, the Doctor locking the time coordinates of the Tardis set the scene for this particular disaster scenario (Martha: _'The only place he can go is planet Earth. Great'_ ), and, although this is a more morally ambiguous issue, he stopped Jack when he wanted to kill the Master, because saving him was more important than saving humanity. Of course in none of these instances the Doctor could have _known_ the exact sequence of consequences, but neither could Jack have known that his harmless piece of space-junk that he even took care wouldn't fall on anyone would have the capacity to turn the whole of the Earth's population into gas-mask wearing kids asking for their mummy, and that didn't even for a moment stop the Doctor blaming him. It’s only logical that the Master's empire is the one disaster Earth is being spared in Donna’s alternative reality in _Turn Left_. Margaret accused Nine of always moving on because he daren't look back, and Davros uses almost the same words in _Journey's End_. Of course neither is the voice of morality or speaks without an agenda, but there is a core of truth in these accusations, and S4 really starts confronting the Doctor with the consequences of his actions, leading up to that moment on the Crucible where he can’t run from himself any longer.

But what is it he really running from? Davros's accusation that he fashions ordinary people into weapons is highly problematic, because it completely negates free will and human agency after a season that vehemently insisted on the importance of both. In _Midnight_ the Doctor wasn’t even able to save himself, much less convince anyone of his philosophy, in _Planet of the Ood_ he couldn't get Solana to help him and in _The Doctor’s Daughter_ he was able to convince Jenny, but couldn't stop General Cobb from shooting her, so the claim that he is able to manipulate people whenever it suits his needs is blatantly untrue. Harriet Jones dies still standing by her actions in _The Christmas Invasion_ , unlike Novice Hame in _New Earth_ never apologising for them, and she isn’t sacrificing herself for her _‘beloved Doctor’_ as Davros puts it, but to save the planet: _'But my life doesn’t matter. Not if it saves the Earth.'_ In _The Parting of Ways_ Rose made a powerful plea for the Doctor having shown her a better way of living her life, of not accepting things, but trying to change the world, and while there is ambiguity in almost everything in DW, this was a rather straightforward statement, and Rose at least still believes that when she tries to convince Donna that she is indeed special and brilliant: _'It just took the Doctor to show you that, simply by being with him. He did the same to me, to everyone he touches.'_

From all the people in the flashback, River Song died for her future that she wanted to keep, Jenny for the world of choices and possibilities that had just opened up before her, and the deaths of the LINDA people were essentially a case of life being terribly unfair. Everyone else—Jabe, the Controller, Lynda, Sir Robert, Mrs. Moore, The Face of Boe, Chanto, Astrid, Luke Rattigan, the hostess, and one could add Captain McDonnell, Mr. Jefferson, Bannakaffalatta, Pete Tyler and of course Jack—died for a greater cause, so that someone else, often quite a lot of people, could live. What Rose said then is still true, although of course they might have done the same even without the Doctor. Whatever dark sides the Doctor may or does have, it's Davros whose vision of an ultimate victory is the destruction of reality itself, of every other life form, and that not only makes his complete lack of moral standing in this debate rather glaringly obvious, but also distorts his perception. The companions are not just tools, not just weapons fashioned by the Doctor. They are not mindless children, but of course Davros, who isn't quite willing to face the fact that he's been locked up by his own Dalek ‘children’ and completely unaware that his own destruction has already been set in motion by one of them who saw the truth of what they’d been—not even metaphorically, but literally— _made_ to be, wouldn't be aware of that. It's Davros and the Daleks that Dalek Caan saw, judged and found wanting beyond the possibility of redemption, not the Doctor. 

In _Voyage of the Damned_ when the Doctor tried to convince Foon to save herself, asking her what her husband would have wanted her to do, her reply was a devastated, outraged, _'He don’t want nothing, he’s dead'_ , and this touches the heart of the Doctor’s struggle. Death isn’t the problem of the dead; it’s the burden of the survivors. Even if he could have prevented only a few of the deaths shown in the flashback, even if many of them would have died whether he'd been there or not, Davros's words reopen a wound that never fully closed after the end of the Time War: they died, and he lives. People who only have this one life are willing to give it up, while he regenerates. In _Dead Man Walking_ Jack felt guilty about sending people into danger knowing the stakes aren't the same for him, but he _can't_ die; the Doctor chooses not to and this makes the issue even more complicated for him. Forced to finally look back, he sees one death after another and what they died for doesn't make a difference any longer; it’s the sheer numbers, that all these people died around him, with him, because of him, or even for him, without him being able to prevent it, while he always is the one who's still alive in the end: this is what he’s running from, and it’s not just his enemies who accuse him of that. _School Reunion_ and Sarah Jane’s fate also showed just how reluctant he is to stop and look back for fear of what he might find there. Focusing only on the present he can deal with one death at a time when it happens, grieve and move on, which is still painful, but in the end bearable. Once he turns around he sees not single deaths, but a long, long string of them, a pattern coalescing around him, and logic dictates that the future will be no different; he's forced to acknowledge just how much death there is, was, and always will be in life, especially in his life, and it’s hard to face this with the philosophical equanimity of _‘everything has its time and everything dies’_. It may not be his fault, Elton even said as much in _Love and Monsters_ , but it still happens and it is a necessary consequence of the life he leads, of all the other lives he saved, and it was also Elton who helplessly protested against the fundamental injustice of the universe throwing something like the Abzorbaloff into his life, destroying his brief moment of happiness: _'That’s not fair!'_ And it isn’t, as the Doctor also acknowledges when Donna is appalled by unfairness of the situation in Pompeii, but even he can’t change that on a fundamental level—unless he risks becoming something even more dangerous to life, something even more profoundly unfair.

If anything, S4 should have shown him how inseparable a part of life death is. In S1 death was the unavoidable ending, in S2 mortality defined what it means to be human, in S3 struggling against mortality. In S4 life and death are so closely linked that it’s almost impossible to separate them any longer, two sides of the same coin. The Adipose are born from dead people, but in the words of the Doctor, _'They're just children. They can't help where they came from'_ , so they are allowed to live. Pompeii has to die so that humanity can continue to exist. Mr. Halpen dies as a man and is reborn as an Ood, and neither Donna nor the Doctor can say with any certainty whether that's right or wrong. The Sontarans are cloned for a life of war and a death they don't even fear, and the people on Messaline are reproduced in so rapidly repeating cycles that a week seems like several lifetimes, killing and dying for a mythical source of life, and the Doctor's daughter is born in the middle of all this. The price for a little girl’s virtual half-life are the Vashta Nerada in the Library. When River Song at the end of _Forest of the Dead_ says, _'Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark, if he ever, for one moment accepts it'_ , this outright contradicts the conclusion of Ten's arc, where it will be his near-downfall that he can't accept death, and his salvation that in the end he can, but it’s signifcant that these apparently are the windmills he'll never completely stop fighting. At the same time the ending of _Forest of the Dead_ isn’t quite the _'Everybody lives!'_ from _The Doctor Dances_ ; it’s at best a compromise, almost a parody, and that he sees it as an acceptable solution says a lot about the direction of Ten’s journey that will soon lead him to _Waters of Mars_ , where in a very similar situation he'll finally break all the rules and claim a power even a Time Lord shouldn't have. 

Davros's, _'How many more? Just think, how many have died in your name?'_ , once again forces him to acknowledge this reverse side of life that he choses to overlook much of the time. Now the Doctor’s nature has always been ambiguous; the narrative never glossed over the danger that accompanied him and his way of living, even while it also described him as wonderful and at times almost set him up as some sort of saviour god. Ever since S1 the question has always been, is it worth it? Is the intensity of life you get with the Doctor worth the cost, and not just the cost to yourself, but also to the people you care about? Rose with her teenage enthusiasm answered yes every time and so did Donna once she overcame her fear, but Martha, who saw the dark side of life when she opened the sphere and realised who was responsible for the state of the Earth even more than the Master, whose family got hurt so badly, decided that this world and this century were enough for her and chose her own path away from the Doctor. Those left behind worrying and waiting, those who lost people, always saw it, as well as those whose lives were only briefly touched by the Doctor: Jackie, Mickey, Francine, Sylvia, Clive, Queen Victoria, Elton. Even the Doctor himself sometimes dreams of a quiet life lived day after day and in _Journey's End_ needs the reassurance that it's been worth it: _'It’s been good, though, hasn’t it? All of us, all of it. Everything we did.'_

The crucial question at the end of S4 is how finally being forced to acknowledge death, and not just death, but so much of it, as part of his life will affect the Doctor. Can he go on loving life, even its dangerous, terrible aspects, as much as he does? Is life still so wonderful? Worse still, does he have the right to enjoy the life he leads when this is the price? The accusation that the Doctor has too much fun _'while there’s disaster all around him'_ , and over his excitement about a brand new life form tends to forget that people died, has been at least as persistent as the reminder of the danger he attractes. If he allowed death greater importance, gave it more weight, would this lead him too close to TW's existentialist crisis and make something like his off-hand, easy, _'Oh, there’s always something worth living for, Martha'_ , harder, if not impossible? And at least for a while the moment of awareness in _Journey's End_ will have this effect, because in _The Other Doctor_ Ten will no longer have an answer when Jackson Lake asks him if _he_ doesn't have anything to live for. Is it only his deliberate, selective blindness towards death in every aspect that separates the Doctor's world and world-view from Jack’s much bleaker one?

In many ways _Journey's End_ is maybe the most realistic of the finales, stolen planets notwithstanding. In _The Parting of Ways_ Nine chose life, but Rose saved him from the consequences of his choice; this time Ten finds himself helpless and powerless in the middle of wholesale annihilation only waiting to happen, without even the possibility to prevent it, because words aren’t an adequate weapon against the Daleks, and even while unlike in _Midnight_ he still is in possession of his voice, it is entirely useless. In _The Doctor’s Daughter_ he described himself as _‘the man who never would’_ , but the man who never would what? Kill? He'd done that that as recently as in _The Fires of Pompeii_. Kill out of anger and revenge? Maybe. At best, the man who never wants to kill again, who decides again and again to never kill again, because he’s afraid of what it might do to him, even if it’s for as necessary cause. When Martha threatens to blow up the planet, he yells at her, _'This is never an option'_ , which is a bit ironic coming from the man who destroyed his own planet. He may not like what Martha, Jack and Sarah Jane are doing, but what does he want them to do? Talking doesn’t even get _him_ out of his holding cell, much less anywhere else, and if he could have ended the Time War by talking he would have done so, but as _The End of Time_ will show, the Time Lords weren’t any more ready to listen to reason or appeals to compassion than the Daleks themselves. He’s miserably clinging to ideals he's increasingly aware he can’t uphold, but daren’t give up either, because he’s afraid of what he might become without them, and this time Rose cannot help him, because she's as helpless as he is; with him, but trapped with him.

In the end the deus ex machina resolution is very, very transparent, because as the human Doctor insists, he is the same: _'I look like him, I think like him. Same memories, same thoughts, same everything.'_ Ten may believe himself changed and removed from all that, but already _Waters of Mars_ will show that he isn’t any less dangerous to be left on his own than his alter ego. He may be horrified at the destruction of the Daleks, but it's a luxury he can afford only because the other Doctor _did_ press the button. _The Fires of Pompeii_ drastically pointed out the consequences of not acting at all, and the Daleks at least are not innocents like the people who died there. It's not an ideal solution, it's nothing to be celebrated, and it's probably not a decision the same person should make more than once because of how it might change their perception of the value of life. On the other hand it was something that needed to be done, and without the slightest doubt saved countless lives. As Jack said in _Adrift_ , some things can't be fixed, or at least they can't be fixed perfectly in an imperfect universe. Principles aren't worth much when no one is left to praise them, and someone who’d rather die than be saved only to score a couple of final points in an effort to maintain some sort of questionable moral high—or at least equal—ground after his plans of eradicating life from the universe failed, is probably beyond help. There are shades of grey, which is something the Doctor sometimes fails to recognise, or maybe deliberately ignores because he’s afraid of losing himself in them, and killing the Daleks doesn't put him—either version of him—on the same level as Davros, just as the Tardis doesn’t equal the Reality Bomb. In _The Doctor's Daughter_ Jenny realised this in the end, after she'd initially thought the Doctor and General Cobb were much the same, only to discover over the course of the episode that there were differences after all, even if there also were similarities.

What _Journey’s End_ reveals isn’t so much the darkness of the Doctor’s soul, but his struggle with the dilemmas the universe presents him with; his unhappiness in the face of a universe where something like the Daleks can be created, where they continue to exist, and again and again almost win, because their only goal is their own survival, impossible to reason with and unhampered by empathy or morals. A universe that is cosmically indifferent to the existence of evil as well as the struggle against it that is never over, much as the Doctor might have wished for that when he ended the Time War; a struggle that can at any time confront him and everyone else who engages in it with the decision to risk their lives, maybe even to kill, in order for life to continue and perhaps become a little better. A universe that is full of death and doesn’t work according to the Doctor’s ideals and wishes, but that he still has to live in as best as he can. To know and accept all this, and to still be able to love life and see it as something that is not just painful, but also wonderful—and this is something that Davros made very difficult for the him. 

More than that, when he forced the Doctor to once again acknowledge the fragility of human life as opposed to a Time Lord's ability to regenerate, this widened a fundamental rift that had always existed in the relationship between the Doctor and his human companions. _School Reunion_ was the first episode that addressed this, but the gulf became increasingly visible especially in S3 with _Human Nature/The Family of Blood_ and in the finale, where the Doctor's primary emotional focus immediately became the person with whom he had little in common except his ability to cheat death. And even while Ten is maybe at his most human with Donna, it's there once again in _Journey’s End_ already with the Doctor's insistence to leave Rose in the parallel world with his mortal alter ego, and will eventually lead to his decision to go on travelling alone. Rose, although not without some hesitation, in the end choses the mortal Doctor, and Donna has to become entirely human again; as for the rest, Martha, Jack, Sarah Jane, Mickey and Jackie, they all have someone to go back to, somewhere to go.

For the most part the children have grown up and are living their own lives, something that had become increasingly obvious throughout S4. It is certainly the most human-centric season so far, even though it also retains a lot of S3’s scepticism towards humanity already with Donna’s comment about the Second Bountiful Human Empire spreading out across the galaxies: _'But look at us. We're everywhere. Is that good or bad, though? I mean, are we like explorers, or more like a virus?'_ and the Doctor’s uncharacteristically pessimistic reply _'Sometimes I wonder.'_ The subsequent revelation that all this is based on slavery made possible by routine mutilation does nothing to dispel this fundamental pessimism, and neither does _The Doctor's Daughter_ , _Midnight_ or the alternative future in _Turn Left_ , but at the same time after the escalating egoism of the third season, S4 shows the Doctor working within a wider human framework: his companions, Torchwood, even UNIT, who are still morally ambiguous, but through whom humanity as a whole has a bit more agency this time, even if the Doctor still claims he's earned the authority to speak on behalf of the Earth. Humans aren’t any longer something of a mixture between children to be taught and beloved pets, the people whose best quality and salvation is their ability to believe in the Doctor. In S4 humanity speaks up. Donna is loud, and she needs to be, to be heard by someone who loves to hear himself talk as much as the Doctor does. She challenges his decisions and forces him to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with getting himself involved in human affairs and his ties to humanity, making him save the Caecilii, or recognise his obligation towards his accidentally created daughter. The Doctor may complain about UNIT's military hierarchy, saluting and weapons, but Martha, who is working for them, is a bit more realistic about people being the enemy on principle just because they're carrying guns, and UNIT stands beside the Doctor in _The Poison Sky_ , playing their part, making their own mistakes and sacrifices, and not always listening to him. 

The season finale is almost entirely of human agency, even more so than in S3 where the Doctor was still a necessary focus for humanity's faith, with Martha something of an apostle, spreading the word about him. Rose and UNIT are working to bring Donna back in time to make the necessary, the crucial, the completely ordinary, insignificant-but-not choice that even the Doctor is subject to. And Donna, ordinary Donna, who hadn't met the Doctor yet, once again makes the decision that she'd made entirely obliviously and accidentally the first time, only now much more aware of what it might gain and cost her. At the moment of despair when in _The Stolen Earth_ even the Doctor doesn’t know what to do any longer and gives up, it’s Harriet Jones who brings them all together with the Subwave Network she developed for this purpose because she knew the Doctor wouldn’t always be there. Martha is threatening to destroy the Earth to thwart the Daleks' plan, and while the Osterhagen Key isn't an acceptable option for either the Doctor or Harriet Jones, Martha, who travelled the ravaged and enslaved Earth during the year that never was, recognises it as a weapon against the Daleks and would have been willing to use it. Sarah Jane, even though she disagrees with Torchwood's methods, is prepared to blow up the Crucible when she saw what the Reality Bomb did, and Jack supports her decision. The Doctor may not be happy with that, but his helpless protest doesn’t change Martha or Jack’s mind. Finally it's Donna who triggers the Human-Time Lord metacrisis, causing the birth of the second Doctor and in the end saving them all, and the new, part-human Doctor destroys the Daleks, while Ten himself for much of the episode is locked up in his holding cell, with little to do but contemplate his complicated relationship with humanity and death; a witness, not a player. In _Evolution of the Daleks_ it was the Doctor's Time Lord DNA that gave the Dalek humans the necessary freedom, now it's _'that little bit of human, that gut instinct that goes hand-in-hand with planet Earth'_ that gives Donna ideas that someone who is 'just' a Time Lord would never have thought of. 

At the end of S4 the Doctor and humanity part ways. Even those who would have wanted to go on travelling with him, Rose and Donna, still have to stay behind. As for Rose, the Doctor is very determined to leave her and his mortal other self in the parallel world, and Donna's human brain can't bear what the metacrisis turned her into; she has to either become fully human again without even a memory of the Doctor, or die, and it's obvious that immediately after being blamed for so many deaths this isn't an option for him. But these last attempts to fix Rose and Donna's lives aside, _The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End_ , where much of the time the events are out of the Doctor’s control as much as they are out of Davros’s, show that the children have indeed grown up and are starting to make their own decisions. The Doctor may still be part of their plan, but his relationship with humanity has changed a lot since _The Christmas Invasion_ where Ten fought the Sycorax leader medieval-style in single combat, with the fate of Earth and humanity hanging in the balance. Harriet Jones stood by the decision she made then despite the Doctor’s disapproval, Jack makes decisions he can be certain the Doctor wouldn't be happy with in Torchwood all the time and he's stopped apologising for it. UNIT will be an unquestioned part of the story in _Planet of the Dead_ , even though in the end their priority will be the safety of the Earth, not the Doctor's. The S4 finale creates a world where the Doctor has to recognise that he isn't any longer the highest moral authority and where humanity has started to take responsibility for its fate and future instead of waiting for someone to save them, although of course that means they'll also have to take responsibility for their mistakes and the consequences of their actions.

 

**VII. Torchwood Children of Earth: So, tell me, what should I have done?**

The dilemma at the centre of CoE is whether delivering twelve children to an unknown fate can be acceptable if it saves the lives of millions, or if it's the prospect of these deaths that should have been accepted instead, and with 25 million lives in the balance there is still room for ambiguity. Does _'If they live because of this, then life is worthless'_ , ( _New Earth_ ) apply here? Do numbers make a difference? In _The Fires of Pompeii_ the Doctor did weigh numbers, but the survival of the entire human race was at stake there. In _Reset_ Jack had an in hindsight slightly ironic—or, on the other hand, rather revealing—fit of moral outrage ( _'slavery, exploitation, a war crime'_ ), not even so much on behalf of the human victims, but the alien test subjects, and vehemently distanced himself when he was being told that what he did wasn't so very different and that the _'greatest discovery in history'_ that probably _would_ have saved more lives than Jack did in 1965, had _'to be worth a few sacrifices'_. Even in the realm of TW's hard decisions what happened in 1965, depriving these children of a choice, of their individuality, picked because they wouldn't be missed, no names because it was easier, lied to and abandoned to a fate no one dared ask about, is not acceptable, and the narrative emphasises this, because there would have been ways to at least make Jack look better in the flashback sequence, rather than someone who doesn't care or even think of saying no, and whom no one expected to. Even if it kills him in the end, it's Ianto, who in this story even more directly than Gwen is channelling the Doctor, insisting that Jack should have stood up to them, or as Rose put it: _'You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no.'_

Gwen is too optimistic, Jack wasn't hoping for the best when he handed over the children; he never allowed himself to indulge in the hope or illusion that they might actually be taken to some sort of paradise, like Ellen Hunt did, or tried to do. Jack was always convinced he'd led them to their deaths, but this was something he thought he could live with, because after all this time death had become something at once omnipresent and in many ways almost meaningless for him. When at the end of _Day Five_ Jack says, _'The whole world is like a graveyard'_ , this reflects not just the events of CoE, but a deeper reality of Jack's life, the _'One day, we're going to run out of space'_ , from _They Keep Killing Suzie_ , the tragedy of seeing other people die for a longer time than anyone should have to, of having seen over the last century and before that so much death that at some point people did become numbers, and _‘just twelve’_ might indeed have sounded like a good deal. By 1965 Jack had been working, even if it was at least partly by his own choice, for more than seventy years for people who to all appearances were relentlessly exploiting his ability to come back from death regardless of what it cost him both mentally and in physical pain ( _'What, in case the aliens are hostile? You need someone who can't die?'_ ), until he became used to matter-of-factly throwing away his own life on a regular basis; it’s hardly surprising that he lost view of the value of life so completely.

In S2, where Jack still believed he could erase his past and live only in the present, his immortality wasn't much of a theme, or only implicitly in Owen's resurrection arc; CoE once again shows how profoundly this determines Jack's life on just about every level, and how much more of a curse than a blessing it is. Jack's relationship with Alice reflects John's situation in _Out of Time_ ; or in Jack's case a lover who ran from him into witness protection, taking their child with her, and died hating him for staying the same while she grew old, a daughter who also wants him to stay away, and a grandson who mustn't know who Jack really is. Between this and _Small Worlds_ it becomes painfully apparent how problematic relationships have become for Jack. If he doesn't tell his partners, he eventually has to leave them behind, maybe to return decades later pretending to be his own son and see them die; if they know from the beginning there's still a very good chance they cannot deal with it. It's against this background that the relationship between Jack and Ianto develops, and it explains why it’s so fraught with issues on both sides; Ianto's fears of not even being remembered that hauntes him to the last and his uncertainty in a relationship where gender and sexual orientation are the least of his problems, and Jack's less explicit, but at least strongly implied apprehension that this will end just like his relationship with Alice's mother once Ianto wakes up to the reality that he's in love with someone for whom only one thing will ever be forever, because if there's something that Jack has learned since the 1940ies, it’s not to make empty promises. But in the end it's Ianto, who saw the body parts taken from the ruins of the Hub and heard Jack scream and scream as he was being slowly suffocated, who, more than Alice ( _'You make us feel old.'_ ), Gwen ( _'You get to shoot first, and ask questions later. How good is that?'_ ), and, understandably, Clem ( _'The man who sent me and my friends to die can't die himself.'_ ) comes closest to understanding that Jack's immortality is also a terrible burden for him, not just something to be envied. 

Alice says, _'A man who can't die has got nothing to fear'_ , and this is probably also one of the dangers the Doctor saw in Jack after his resurrection, even still in _Last of the Time Lords_ when he effectively marooned him on early 21st century Earth, although his own issues with death, immortality, and power make him blind to the fact that this might be _his_ temptation, but at least so far has never been Jack's, who wants nothing more than to be rid of his immortality again. But the crucial thing that at least Alice might have realised, because it's a thought that occurred immediately and naturally to Frobisher when he decided to have her and Steven kidnapped, is that as long as there are people Jack cares about of course he has something to fear, however careless he might be with his own life. Of course there are consequences for him, even if it's in a roundabout way. As Jack said in _Cyberwoman_ , _'There's always something left to lose.'_

Actions and consequences, even the unforeseeable and often disproportionate consequences of minor actions, have been Jack's theme since the beginning, and these stories are never just about the factual technicalities of guilt and responsibility; there's almost always also the recognition of a deeper emotional empathy and connection. In _The Empty Child_ / _The Doctor Dances_ the Doctor not just forced Jack to acknowledge that he caused all that even if he hadn't intended to, but also to stop treating the whole situation as a bit of a joke and the great disasters of Earth's history as a convenient stage for his self-cleaning cons. In _Day One_ it was Gwen who accepted her responsibility for what happened to Carys and the people who died as a result, even after Jack directly told her that this sort of thinking would get her nowhere, effectively shocking him out of the breezy indifference of the first two episodes and forcing him to finally take her seriously when she was willing to risk her own life to save at least Carys. _Captain Jack Harkness_ took Jack back to the beginning of his story, bringing him face to face with the man whose name Jack had assumed because he happened to be conveniently dead, and whom he then had to meet in person, even fall in love with a bit; whose impending death he had to regret and take inspiration from. In S2 Gray’s fate confronted Jack with the dreadful consequences of a small mistake made a long time ago ( _'actions, ramifications, ripples in a pond'_ ), and in CoE it’s once more the past that Jack had hoped would stay buried and forgotten that’s coming back to haunt him. 

_Captain Jack Harkness_ also showed how reluctant Jack usually is to give up the truth about his past, how effectively and throroughly he hides behind the persona he chose and projects; only at the end of the episode Toshiko finally found out the truth hidden behind layers of silence, evasions and lies. In CoE this choice is out of Jack’s hands almost from the beginning. Starting with the explosion in _Day One_ that tears Jack's body apart and takes out the Hub, erasing much of his past on Earth and destroying the only home he'd known in more than a century, the masks start coming off one after another. In _Day Three_ Gwen and Ianto, more than Jack himself, make an attempt to put back together again what they lost at least on a makeshift material level. Ianto gives Jack back the trappings and armour of his persona, and that at least for a moment restores Jack's confidence and sense of self ( _'I'm back.'_ ), but it doesn't erase the trauma of the last couple of days that is still visible in the stark honesty of his conversation with Ianto in the warehouse, and that Jack never fully recovers from before the next blow hits with the realisation that the events of 1965 are at the bottom of all this, and a different kind of explosion slowly and inexorably takes his life apart from the inside out, throwing him into a turmoil of events he never manages to gain control over. Jack’s remorse when he comes face to face with Clem whose entire life had been stolen, leaving him in every way that matters stuck in 1965 more than Jack, who remained the same only physically, is genuine, without even an attempt at justifications or evasions, and after Clem shot him, Jack probably for the first time over the course of the show actively reaches out for support and comfort, first clinging to Ianto when he wakes up, and then walking over to him while Gwen is going after Clem, even at the risk of the uncomfortable questions he can reasonably expect. There are absolutely no defences when Ianto throws, _'That's not what I meant'_ , back at him, just shock and hurt; it’s only in the next scene with Gwen, buttoning up a fresh shirt, erasing the last traces of his death that already are no longer visible on his body, that the defences slide back in place again: _'We had no choice.'_

But the full horror of it hits Jack, and hits him visibly harder than any of the others, only when he sees the images; his incredulous, shocked, _'It's still just a child'_ , because this—not death, but being condemned to live under such terrible circumstances without the possibility to end it—is what Jack can most viscerally empathise with. And this is where Ianto, who unlike Gwen isn’t for a moment willing to accept Jack’s claim about not having had a choice, probably without even knowing what buttons he is pushing, so easily and without the least hesitation resolving a dilemma that Jack faced years before Ianto was even born, makes Jack want to be a hero again, never mind common sense. This is where almost accidentally Jack and Ianto between them create this ill-timed 'What Would the Doctor Do?' moment, and what already didn't work in _Journey's End_ goes horribly wrong in TW, where there are no deus ex machina solutions. And this isn't the end yet of this chain of cause and effect from which there is no escape for Jack, not even the one Frobisher takes; there is no one to save him from either having to do something terrible or live with the guilt of having done nothing. The brutal logic of CoE is that Jack, who was picked to deliver the children in 1965 because they wanted someone who didn't care, now, rather like Frobisher, who said no for the first time when it came to his own daughters, who weren't _'units'_ after all, but _'just girls'_ , cares desperately; that Jack, who sometimes has a rather too casual relationship with death now is forced to face just what killing another person means, what death means, when you're not weighing numbers and don't have the luxury of not knowing the names. And Jack, who gladly would have died instead of Steven, can't. So far Jack's immortality, unwanted as it was, has helped him dodge consequences to an extent, certainly in the S1 finale, but also in _Exit Wounds_ ; this time his death, set at the beginning of the story rather than its end, doesn't solve anything, it doesn’t save anyone or atone for anything. In _Day Four_ and _Day Five_ the masks come off pretty thoroughly, showing not just both Ianto and Gwen that there is a lot more to Jack than they were aware of or wanted to see, but also confronting Jack himself with who he was, who he is and what he is capable of. When Jack says good bye to Gwen in the end, he's still wearing the coat Ianto bought him, but he leaves in search of a new life and his old self doesn't really fit any longer. 

The question Jack faces at the end of CoE is similar to the one the Doctor was confronted with in _Journey's End_ —Steven, Ianto, Owen, Toshiko, Suzie... is it really his fault, and, if yes, how much of it? In some ways of course it is. He recruited them. He maybe wasn't the best of leaders. Toshiko especially didn't have much of a choice, but everything was better than that cell and _she_ didn't blame him. Owen was grieving, vulnerable and doubting his sanity after Jack decided not to retcon him because he needed a doctor; it's hard to tell what his life would have been like without Torchwood, and much the same can be said for Ianto, who found meaning, however imperfect, in Torchwood, and he also tried to tell Jack that it wasn’t his fault, although it’s doubtful the message got through at the time. Suzie was probably the only one where Jack could and should have noticed something was wrong, but Torchwood wasn’t the cause of her problems, it only exacerbated them. 

Jack killed Steven, but he didn't order to have Alice and Steven, who would have been safe in Cardiff, kidnapped and held hostage. Jack might have been happy to forget the 456, but unlike in _Adrift_ , and maybe partly because of the events there, this time he wasn't the one obsessed until the end with covering up the events of 1965, proposing and ordering assassinations and effectively preventing even the possibility to find a solution until it was almost too late—that was the good, hard-working John Frobisher. The circumstances under which Jack joined Torchwood are highly problematic and strongly imply that there were probably plenty of instances in all that time where he should have and could have said no and didn't, but he wasn't the only one involved in 1965 and it's not certain at all whether 'standing up to them' would have stopped anything. Maybe. Or perhaps they would just have thrown him into a cell and picked someone else to hand over the children. 

Jack usually isn't very given to introspection unless he absolutely can’t escape it, and maybe it's time for him to take a long, hard look at what he'd done with his life in the century that to him was little more than time to be passed somehow until he met the Doctor again, but Jack blaming himself for something that is partly, but certainly not only his fault, isn't just taking responsibility, it's also a desperate attempt to give the events some sort of meaning, to regain at least a little control over them. At the beginning of CoE Dr. Patanjali told Gwen about the increase in suicides after the appearance of aliens on Earth, because people lost their faith and with it the certainty in their own importance in a universe that suddenly became a lot bigger. Ellen Hunt, faced with the demands and promises of the 456, put these events in a religious context of gods and sacrifices, mixed with Christian hopes of paradise, trying to give them a higher significance. And finally in _Day Five_ Gwen to all intents and purposes tries to replace the God she lost with the Doctor, accepting that what is happening here is a human atrocity, but still needing to explain, to understand the absence of help in a situation like this. Jack's universe is colder and harder; if he ever had any kind of faith he lost it a long time ago. He doesn't have Ellen Hunt's illusions or Gwen's hopes, but if it's all his fault, Gray in S2, and now this, there is a reason why it happened, it wasn't just random. If it all could have been prevented—if _he_ could have prevented it—, then the universe is maybe a less cold and indifferent place that leaves us only at each others' mercy, a place where these things are done to children, and lives are wasted and bartered with, sold and bought, used and abused and thrown away and so often worth so very little. A place where ever three seconds a child dies and _'the human response is to accept, and adapt'_. _Exit Wounds_ wasn't fair on Jack if one looks at it as punishment for the mistake, if one can even call it that, of a child made in a panic, but what happened to Gray was even less fair. The tragedy of CoE was horrible for Jack, but horrendously unfair to the children given to the 456 in 1965, Clem, who unlike Jack never had time enough to come to terms with what these events, Steven, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and never had a chance, or Alice who worried about the state of the world and condemned her own son. Jack's confrontation with these fundamental injustices of life that most of the time are beyond a single person's control, as well as—once again—with his unchosen and unwanted immortality and the guilt of surviving when all around him people die, matches the Doctor's moment of self-awareness that Davros forced on him in the S4 finale, but Jack, who doesn’t have a Time Lord's power, in the end can only try to run from himself, whereas the Doctor will attempt to change the whole universe around him rather than accept this.

At the end of the story Jack feels he has nothing left to stay on Earth for, but however bleak things may be, he still is left with something. CoE with its juxtaposition between the Jack of 1965 and the Jack Ianto and Gwen know and love, is also very much about Jack's struggle for the humanity that not only Gwen challenged at the beginning of S1 and implicitly even in S2's _Sleeper_ , but that at least by inference the entire philosophy of both TW and DW, where being human is very much defined through mortality, calls into question. In _Sleeper_ the thing Beth feared most was to lose her humanity and with it even the guilt for having killed her husband, to forget and no longer care about him. For her the lack of capacity to feel pain was worse than the pain itself, and according to this inexorable logic she chose to die. At the end of CoE Jack, who promised Ianto not to forget him with heartbreaking determination, at least least still has all that, the pain and the guilt, because of course love made him just as vulnerable as he warned Gwen it would make her in _Meat_ , and even while he has the means to rid himself of these memories, he's holding on to them so much that after six months he still cannot even bear to remain on the planet any longer. 

The message of CoE is the same that was so pervasive in S1—the hardest thing, and sometimes, like for Jack at the end of this story, the impossible thing is to live on, to keep fighting for life and humanity, and hope that it's worth the cost, even if it's for a world that is far from perfect, where the thin veneer of civilization cracks much too fast under pressure and gives way to the egoistic banality of evil, where even good men fall so easily and people like Dekker, who follow orders and stand back survive; to be strong enough to find a balance between empathy and despair, and to be able to do all this without any kind of metaphysical safety net, and with the knowledge of being only a tiny spot in an infinite, indifferent universe, a blip in time.

 

**VIII. Doctor Who 2009/10 specials: Lived too long.**

_The Next Doctor_ lines out the two paths Ten will have to decide between for the remainder of his story, after he chose to disentangle himself from the painful complications of human relationships—because people leave, because they break his heart, because he loses them, and, unspoken but obvious after the S4 finale, already when he refuses to take Jackson Lake with him when he confronts the Cyberking, because they run a high risk of dying ( _'Jackson, you’ve got your son. You’ve got a reason to live.'_ ) The connection between the Doctor and Jackson Lake is obvious. Jackson Lake for a time became the Doctor hiding from the pain and loss in his own life and, recognising himself in the Doctor's story and the loss _he_ suffered, took on his pain instead, and like him is trying to save others. The similarities with Miss Hartigan, in whom the suffering found a different, destructive outlet, are not as readily apparent, but she also shares many traits with Ten: the passion, the imagination, the anger, the ego, the arrogance and the willpower, and like the Doctor himself at this point of his journey she is alone, cut off from all real contact with humanity, surrounded only by the Cybermen and Cyber-creatures. When the Cybermen promise her that she'll be free of the emotions that tormented her all her life, she doesn't want this any more than Ten did in _The Age of Steel_ , and she is indeed strong enough to hold on to them. Her reaction when she becomes Cyberking and sees the universe with new eyes is very, very Doctor-like: _'I can see the stars. The worlds beyond. The vortex of time itself and the whole of infinity. Oh, but it’s glorious'_ , and, baffling the Cyberman: _'There is so much joy in this machine.'_ Her mind dominates even them, and Ten, who at the end of the story says to Jackson Lake, _'Just this once you’ve actually gone and changed my mind. And not many people can do that'_ , absolutely recognises this connection between them when he does something that isn't so very differently from what Davros did in _Journey's End_ and kills her with a moment of self-knowledge. 

In _The Age of Steel_ the Doctor rejected the offer of a life without pain and grief, telling Mr. Lumic that this would be tantamount to killing him, but he didn't have an answer any longer when in _Journey's End_ the Supreme Dalek mocked his despair over the destruction of the Tardis ( _'Then if emotions are so important, surely we have enhanced you?'_ ) He'd already been reluctant to take Donna with him in _Partners of Crime_ , outright admitting that he'd almost destroyed Martha's life, although neglecting to mention that the next prospective fellow traveller got herself killed before she could even set foot in the Tardis, and after he had to leave her behind in _Journey's End_ , he began to deliberately minimise possible sources of further grief, insisting on his decision to travel alone both at the end of _The Next Doctor_ and _Planet of the Dead_. It's a very human reaction, but one that in his case quickly starts to unravel the carefully balanced system that helped him keep his power,— _himself_ —in check. _The Runaway Bride_ was the first episode that explicitly addressed the possible dangers inherent in the Doctor's loneliness with Donna telling him that he needed someone to stop him, but even before that Sarah Jane had already done the same in _School Reunion_ , and Rose in _Dalek_. _Turn Left_ proved Donna right, _Waters of Mars_ proves her right once again, and Ten himself, when he told Rose that the human Doctor was _‘too dangerous to be left on his own’_ , already knowing that _he_ would go on travelling alone, conveniently ignored that as recently as in _The Fires of Pompeii_ he'd finally agreed with Donna and admitted that sometimes he really did need someone to stop him. Without a human companion, the lingering issues with power and death that have always been part of Ten's arc emerge almost immediately in full force. 

_Planet of the Dead_ sets the scene, transporting him to a planet that every instinct is telling him to get off of immediately because, even if he doesn't know it yet, he's surrounded by nothing but death, caused by creatures with a _'perfect design'_ he even admires, but also a complete indifference to the life they erase, turning planet after planet into a desert. He manages to escape from that at the last moment, only to recieve the prediction of his own death, this time in much less uncertain terms than in _Planet of the Ood_. But before this can become an issue, it's the imminent death of other people that pushes him to his breaking point and beyond. In _Waters of Mars_ there is no one to stop him until it's too late, driven to the end of his endurance when he's confronted not just with the possibility of death, but the certainty of it, and isn't allowed to run away, but has to watch the events unfold, death after death. The story of the sisterhood in _New Earth_ at the very beginning of Ten’s story demonstrated that there is potential for terrible actions even in compassion and the desire to save lives, and out of the very same reasons he now crosses the last line, finally brushing aside the laws he had felt himself bound by so far, and with the best intentions becomes something immediately unpredictably dangerous.

In _The End of the World_ Nine said that everything had to die; Ten, who had always been less inclined to accept this, got his memento mori once every season: from Sarah Jane in _School Reunion_ ( _'Everything has its time. Everything ends.'_ ), the Face of Boe in _Gridlock_ ( _'Everything has its time. You know that, old friend, better than most.'_ ), and Ood Sigma in _Planet of the Ood_ ( _'Every song must end.'_ ) In _Waters of Mars_ Adelaide delivers this message in the most direct and brutal way possible, shocking him out of his conceit when he wasn't willing to listen to arguments any longer. Her death is easily the most complex of the deaths in DW, because in many ways it is suicide rather than one of those heroic self-sacrifices, but at the same time it's not an act of despair, but an act of will. This is not _Father's Day_ , the fate of the world isn't immediately at stake. She doesn't know yet what consequences the Doctor saving her will have; they might be enormous, they might be minimal. But for Adelaide, who didn't want to die either when she first learned that she would, it isn't just about the immediate consequences for her family; her mind instantly jumps to the implications the Doctor's act might have for humanity in general, and the potential danger of someone claiming that much power. Her death is an act of human protest against someone who has started to set himself above all the rules, above humanity, with no one to stop him; who very literally claims omnipotence, but also insists on meddling with human lives, both rescuing and, as Gwen implied in CoE, withholding help in judgement, effectively handing out both life and death.

Even if it's the Doctor's lack of help Gwen tried to explain there, not God's, her statement is essentially only one more attempt to reconcile the reality of suffering and evil with the concept of a good, just, and omnipotent God, and it’s probably no coincidence that the task of explaining the Doctor's absence falls to Gwen, whom Suzie accused of having a faith that never left primary school, and who a few years earlier, before she met Jack and discovered Torchwood, probably _would_ have tried to understand why God wasn't helping in a situation like that. But although such an explanation might have become necessary after DW progressively built up the theme of the Doctor as some sort of saviour god, most obviously maybe with the use of religious themes and imagery in the S3 finale, this still doesn't make him a god. Leaving aside the obvious narrative necessity, in a universe that may or may not be infinite his absence might be explained by any number of reasons that have nothing to do at all with _'[turning] away in shame'_ and passing judgement on humanity, or even events fixed in time. However, once he becomes someone for whom, as he says, there is nothing he can't do any longer, the events of CoE, and not just that, _everything_ , every single moment, past, present or future, because there are no laws any longer to stop him from going back into his past, becomes his responsibility, and his non-interference would turn him into the kind of god that Gwen implicitly made him—one that deliberately turns away in disgust while children suffer, who choses who lives and who dies, and this god would indeed be a monster. The Time Lords resolved this dilemma by swearing _'never to interfere, only to watch'_ , a rule that the Doctor ignored, which from the start put him in a potentially precarious position vis-á-vis humanity, but his actions in _Waters of Mars_ turn this latent problem into an acute one. The consequences and fundamental injustices that would arise from the situation he creates there are more unbearable than the indifferent brutality of coincidence and the logical brutality of consequences combined, and what Adelaide does when she shoots herself is claim human autonomy back from this, insisting that after all it _is_ also for her—and for humanity—to decide that the Time Lord Victorious is wrong. If Ten starts playing at being a god in earnest, he'll not only entangle himself in the theological problems humanity has been debating for millennia, but the show's atheism and humanism will turn on him too, and at the end of _Waters of Mars_ his, _'Isn't anyone going to thank me?'_ is uncomfortably close to Miss Hartigan's disappointed, _'My people. Why do they not rejoice?'_ , when people ran from the Cyberking screaming in fear.

Adelaide showed him that he can't escape from the reality of death as part of life, or should attempt to erase it, but when he sees the Ood standing in the snow at the end of the episode, he still attempts to run at least from his own death, and once again it's the knowledge of what is going to happen that drives him to this reaction. Nine complained a bit when he suddenly found himself likely to die in a cellar in Cardiff in _The Unquiet Dead_ , but the determined _'No!'_ with which Ten is now running from a certainty rather than just a possibility is new. However, even while he's trying to buy himself more time and leave death behind, it is already beginning to overshadow his life and thoughts, and when he tells Ood Sigma about all the things he did, the places he travelled to avoid his summons, it sounds forced and false; the genuine joy is gone, replaced by a deliberate imitation of his usual enthusiasm. So far his love for life and travelling, the joy of discovery, have always more than balanced the streak of despair that Martha, who went with Ten through the darkest times, did recognise: _'All those things you've been ready to die for. I thought for a moment there you'd finally found something worth living for.'_ Even then his reply had been that there's always something worth living for, and the answer seemed sincere, because there was absolutely no doubt that he loved life, whether he had anything to live _for_ or not. The balance only tipped in the confrontation with death that Davros forced upon him. In _The Next Doctor_ this certainty is gone, and in _The End of Time_ Ten's mood is maybe best characterised by his conversation with Wilf in the cafe, especially when Wilf tells him about Donna's unconscious sadness: _'She's making do'_ , and his only reply is a dejected, _'Aren't we all?'_ He's trying to run, first from pain, then from death, but the running has taken over his life and left him with little to live on. 

But in _The End of Time_ he's not alone in this. All the villains of the story in one way or another refuse to give in to the inevitability of death. The one with the comparatively best intentions, Mr. Naismith, who wants immortality not even for himself, but for his beloved daughter; the Master, who preferred death to life with the Doctor in S3, but at the same time—much like TW's Suzie—planned his return from it and now ressurects with a litany of _'Never dying!'_ , but with a body that is born out of death and can do nothing but die. And of course the Time Lords, who didn't just, in Jack's words, create one psychopath, but have become corrupt and monstrous almost in their entirety, wanting to ascend beyond the limits of the physical body and the physical world and its laws, _'free of time and cause and effect'_. Even in _Waters of Mars_ the Doctor only wanted to bend the laws of time to his will; the Time Lords intend to abolish time, the one thing that still binds them, entirely. Rassilon kills the female Time Lord who dared point out the perversion of the Time War— _'millions die every second, lost in bloodlust and insanity, with time itself resurrecting them to find new ways of dying, over and over again, a travesty of life'_ —and suggest (recalling Nine in _The Parting of Ways_ ) that _'perhaps it's time'_ , screaming that he would not die and let a billion years of Time Lord history perish. His focus is entirely on the past; he may strive for eternal life, but he's also lost any concept of a definition of life that goes further than merely avoiding death. And in the middle of all this there's the Doctor and an old man, whose reply to Ten's genuinely scared but at the same time almost comically grandiose announcement that he's going to die is a simple, _'Well, so am I, one day'_ , and whom the Doctor would be proud to call his father. 

Being a Time Lord doesn't give Ten any claims to superiority, moral or otherwise, any longer when the Time Lords have proven themselves just as prone to corruption as humanity, and the only difference between them and the last of mankind a hundred trillion years in the future, at the end of _their_ history, desperate and willing to do anything for the price of survival, is the amount of power they possess and the sheer scale of their plans; Rassillon is no better than Lady Cassandra, Mr. Lumic or Prof. Lazarus, just more monstrous. The story has finally come full circle, and it not only validates the Doctor's decision to end the Time War, but also shows that the Time Lords had not been collateral damage or innocents, but in the end every bit as dangerous as the Daleks themselves. In S1 Nine's struggle had been not to become like the Daleks he blamed for the fate of his people, full of anger and hate and too ready to kill; now it becomes obvious that all this time the Doctor—Ten maybe more than Nine—was also trying to avoid the pitfalls his own people had fallen prey to. Having seen what the centuries-long Time War did to them made him extremely aware of the danger of corruption through war and killing. He sees the seeds of what perverted the Time Lords, the violence and the endless war, everywhere, and since in the end he was forced to destroy them to save the universe, there is little room for a middle ground in his mind when he recognises the same potential for destructiveness in humanity. This is the root of his uncompromising dislike of weapons as well as his extreme reaction to Harriet Jones's decision to have the Sycorax ship shot down, and of course his treatment of Jack, whose immortality gives him at least partial freedom from consequences and makes him even more suspect in the Doctor's eyes, and more likely to overstep the bounds.

But most of all it makes him suspect himself, because _he_ , after all, shared the Time Lords history, _he_ has their power, and _he_ fought in the same war as they did and ended it with an act that in and of itself was scarcely less enormous than what they'd been planning. When Wilf offers him the gun to kill the Master before the Master can kill him, he refuses to take it because, _'That's how the Master started.'_ He's seen what the Time Lords became, how killing infected and changed them beyond recognition, he's seen where the Master's choices led him, and he takes these examples are a mirror and warning for himself ( _'Wonder what I'd be without you.'_ ) In _The End of Time_ there is more rational (self-)reflection in his relationship with the Master than there was in _Last of the Time Lords_ ; he isn't as driven by loneliness and guilt as he was then. In many respects they are very much the same in this story, two fallen Time Lords running from death, dreaming of a glorious past in an industrial wasteland, but even while the Doctor still wants to help the Master, his lines are firmly drawn ( _'All that eloquence. But how many people have you killed?'_ ), and he certainly isn't willing to risk the danger of replacing the Master with himself. Especially after _Waters of Mars_ he is very aware of the temptation of power and afraid of what he might become, so much that even when Wilf confronts him with his responsibility for the people on Earth he still doesn't trust himself enough to take the gun. 

In _The End of Time_ the lines between the Doctor and humanity blur completely. The arrogance of the Time Lord Victorious never entirely disappeared after _Waters of Mars_ , and it fully resurfaces when he rages that he is so much more important and worthy to live than Wilf, but at the same time there are also moments of genuinely felt humility that are unlike both Nine's blatant rudeness and Ten's tendency to set himself up as a parent or teacher. This emotion shines through again and again in his long conversations with Wilf, especially when Wilf is shocked to hear that the Doctor has lived for nine hundred years, while dozens of generations of humans lived and died and slowly struggled forward through history: _'We must look like insects to you'_ , to which the Doctor's replies, _'I think you look like giants.'_ And already Ten's realisation that even as a Time Lord he might not be able to cheat death as much as he'd like to after all, his genuine fear of it, whether it's a final death before he has the chance to regenerate, or the regeneration that still means the death of his current personality, something that is perhaps even harder to bear for someone with his ego, make him very, very human.

The Doctor always loved humans, but the ultimate trial is for him to recognise that he is no better than they, and in the end he finally does what so many of them have done over the four seasons of the show, die so that another person can live, even if he's still only partially resigning himself to mortality. And because he gave in to the temptation of power so much that he even tried to change the laws of time to avert and avoid death, because he crossed the line well and truly in _Waters of Mars_ and is still standing dangerously close to it, he has to do it quietly, without fanfares or grand gestures. The universe has already been saved, humanity's future is assured at least until the next catastrophe; now it's only a life for a life. More than that, an old man who doesn't even want the Doctor to die for him, and offers him this last way out. Ten doesn't give in immediately, but in the middle of his outburst about the unfairness of life and death, where the anger and arrogance flare up again and he one last time rebels against the injustice of a universe that refuses to reward him, he comes to himself, sees what he's on the verge of becoming, and realises that he _has_ lived too long, that even though he doesn't want to die, even though there are still so many things he could do, the time has come. 

Considering that the Doctor isn't human at all, and Jack hasn't really been that either for a long time, the endings of their stories are deeply human, circling around issues like mortality, emotions, power, decisions, and consequences, and on a very fundamental level this is what it means, what it _is_ to be human, in the 21st century or any other. After he lost his mortality in _The Parting of Ways_ , Jack's struggle with and for his humanity above all meant coming to terms with a life he didn't choose and can't get rid of, and finding a way of living it. Closely related to this is the necessity to acknowledge the consequences of his actions, something that immortality at least to an extent removes him from, but the tragedy of CoE once more cruelly reminded him of. The Doctor's, especially Ten's, main issue has also always been death, but he fights against the mortality that Jack craves, against the necessity and unavoidability death, and in _Waters of Mars_ he is once again forced to accept it as part of the universe, and finally in _The End of Time_ also for himself. Both he and Jack have a long journey behind them when they briefly see each other again in that bar, a journey during which they encountered almost impossible decisions and had to make terrible choices, and that in the end brought them to a moment where they had to face themselves, what they are, who they are, and what they are capable of. Both were confronted with the consequences of their actions, helplessly entangled in the chain of cause and effect the Time Lords wanted to free themselves from, and in the end, after Pompeii, after _Waters of Mars_ , after _Journey's End_ , there isn't anything left of the Doctor's superiority towards someone he once considered wrong; in the end he is only concerned about Jack making the same mistake that he himself made after losing Donna, believing that it's easier and less painful alone. In _Gridlock_ the Face of Boe told Ten that he wasn't alone, which, if it only referred to the Master had been as much a warning as a promise, and if referred to the fact that he wouldn't need to be alone if he only opened his eyes and looked at who was standing beside him, profoundly misunderstood by the Doctor. But maybe at the end of his own journey he finally understood it, because the message he gives Jack in _The End of Time_ is essentially the same. And it's an important one for both of them. The Doctor's story especially shows that the contact with humanity is vital for him, and that it's his companions who give him the necessary perspective and keep him from getting dangerously lost in the big picture of time and space, but Jack's arc makes it equally obvious that he needs this connection to the fabric of human life, not just as a moral compass, but because he, unlike the Doctor, needs to be in love with a person before he can be in love with life or the world. And as the Face of Boe told Ten in _New Earth_ , time and time again he'll need someone to teach him to look at the universe with new eyes when he's grown tried of it. Both of them, the Time Lord and the man turned immortal, at least indirectly need the confrontation with the finiteness of life, this connection to humanity that Jack lost for such a long time and the Doctor rejects with every regeneration.

 

**The end is where we start from.**

 


End file.
